Italy to Santiago II Part 1: Via Domitia Day 38 Arles

C'est quand on met de la lumière dans l'ordinaire qu'il devient extraordinaire 

(It’s when you bring light to the ordinary that it becomes extraordinary)

- Laetitia Sioen, a.k.a. "l.s.poesie", on a wall in Arles

Did I say I was going to stop in Arles, yesterday? Well, I changed my mind. The weather forecast isn't as bad now as it looked a couple of days ago, though it's still variable rather than consistently sunny; plus, it turns out that my husband will be travelling to this part of France on business in ten days' time, so we can meet up and go home together. And in the meantime, I can get a couple hundred kilometres more behind me, on the Chemin de Compostelle!

I had booked two nights in Arles before coming to a decision about this, because if I wanted to go home, there was no point in attempting to catch a train on the day of a nationwide general strike; and if I wanted to continue walking, there was no point in doing so in the rain. Besides, the last time I came to Arles, it was at the end of a 32-kilometre stage, and I had no time or energy to see anything other than the cathedral. So I planned to take a day to view the sights in Arles, and make a plan for what to do next. 

My first stop was the Office de Tourisme,  where I purchased a Pass Liberté allowing me to visit four monuments and two museums in the city of Arles. In winter, none of them open until 10:30, so I spent the intervening time sorting out some practical issues, such as postponing an appointment back home, booking my accommodation in Saint-Gilles, getting a new pilgrim credential and replenishing my supply of blood pressure medication! Then I walked out to the most distant of the monuments on the list. On the way, I passed by the Roman amphitheatre, one of the largest in the Roman world.

The amphitheatre is actually a fairly late invention of the Romans: the Coliseum in Rome was of course the first, built between A.D. 72 and 80, after which it was imitated throughout the Western Roman Empire. The amphitheatre in Arles is slightly larger than the one in Nîmes, with a 21-metre-high facade composed of two levels of sixty semi-circular arches.

What makes the amphitheatre in Arles unique is the addition of four towers in medieval times, when the construction was reused as a dwelling-place and fortified refuge for the local population. Starting in 1822, the 212 homes that had been built inside the amphitheatre were expropriated and demolished as part of a major project for clearing out and restoring the city's Roman monuments. Personally, I wish they had left the houses there - it must have been a unique neighbourhood! 

1622 illustration of the inhabited arena

My next stop was Les Alyscamps, Provençal for Champs Elysées: an ancient Roman burial ground that later became a Christian cemetery, in use until the fifteenth century. Three centuries later, the advent of industrialisation, and with it the construction of the Paris-Lyon-Mediteranée railway line and the Canal de Craponne, altered the landscape and broke up the area. But only a few decades later, it was nonetheless a favourite haunt of painters Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.

Vincent Van Gogh, Les Alyscamps (1888)

Same trees, grown older? 

At the end of the avenue of Les Alyscamps are the ruins of the medieval church of Saint-Honnorat. The whole complex is located outside of the city walls - the Romans always kept the dead well separated from the living - and so I headed a little further out of the town centre into a big box shopping district to buy a pair of warm gloves and a few supplies from the Biocoop. Then I walked back into the city centre, arriving in Place de la République just in time to catch a protest march, part of the nation-wide general strike that is one of the reasons I'm staying put in Arles today.

The Roman forum of the colony then known as Arelate, from the Gaulish Arelati meaning "by the marsh", stood in the area that is now Place de la République, still the centre of civic life in Arles, now occupied by the cathedral and the city hall (as well as the demonstrators). Built in the first century B.C. under the Emperor Augustus, the forum required solid foundations, which are now known as the Cryptoportiques and can be visited by descending a staircase right inside the city hall. 

A model illustrating what the Forum would have looked like, in the archeological museum

Just across the square from the Cryptoportiques is the cathedral cloister. I had already been into the cathedral itself a few times, first to get my credential stamped, then to attend the evening service, and finally to purchase a new pilgrim credential when I realised I might run out of space on my current one. But I hadn't been to the medieval cloister since my previous visit to Arles in 2017. I went back to look round it again, in the company of the cathedral cat.

After retiring to my apartment for lunch, I tackled the final monument on my list: the Roman theatre. The last time I walked into Arles, in 2017, I stayed at La Maison du Pèlerin et du Routard, a hostel with bunk beds and an amazing view over the Roman theatre; it's not there any more (I checked). But this time I had a ticket to go inside the Roman theatre. A video illustrates how impressive a construction the theatre was in its time, with seats for 10,000 people on three tiers, only the lowest of which have been preserved and in part rebuilt. A pair of multicoloured marble columns is all that remains of the original stage scenery, in which rows of columns of different types of marble were decorated with statues. Like the amphitheatre, the site was reused after the fall of the Roman Empire by the local inhabitants, who helped themselves to the stones from the upper tiers for use building their houses on, in and around the ancient theatre. Only one small section still rises to the theatre's original height, because it was converted into a defensive tower in the Middle Ages. The theatre is now once again in use for outdoor performances, hence the metal stage and supports for stage lighting.

The Roman theatre and, to the far left, the hostel I stayed in last time!

A model of what the theatre originally looked like

The limestone already had a long history behind it before the Romans cut it into steps! 

Having visited all four of the monuments my ticket allowed, I went on to the two museums. One of these was obligatorily the Réattu museum, featuring paintings by local neo-realist painter Jacques Réattu (1760 - 1833), with a few Picasso drawings thrown in for good measure! The museum is housed in the former Grand Priory of the Knights of the Order of Malta, which was confiscated by the state following the Revolution and then purchased by the artist himself; I found the building more interesting than the art itself. 

Lastly, I walked a kilometre along the bank of the Rhône to the Musée Départemental Arles Antique, a large and fascinating archaeological museum constructed next to the site of the Roman Circus. The most interesting exhibit in the museum is a Gallo-Roman river barge that sunk in the Rhône and lay covered with silt, complete with all its cargo and fittings, for over 2000 years until it was raised up out of the river and preserved in a painstaking process that took several years, described in a video shown in the museum.

Roman mosaic floor

There is plenty more to see in Arles, but I was done for the day: being a tourist and walking around a city all day is more tiring than walking down a trail! I didn't use the GPS tracker today, but my step counter says I walked 15 kilometres! Time to retire to my cosy nook with a cup of tea and a book.

Italy to Santiago II Part 1: Via Domitia Day 37 Fontvieille - Arles

The trick of successful walking is knowing when to stop.

— Bill Bryson, A walk in the woods

My luck has run out. In 36 days of walking up to this point, I've had only one day of rain, plus one day that I took off because of the rain. But now,  the months of summer sunshine are finally over - even in the south of France. Which is not too bad, considering that my aim for this section of my Long Walk was to reach Arles - and as of this morning, I had only ten more kilometres to go!

Jean-Jacques, my host in Fontvieille, refused to believe the weather forecast. Rain would interfere with the olive harvest! He popped out after dark to look at the sky and reported that he could see the stars: it definitely wasn't going to rain in the morning, no matter what Météo France had to say about it. 

So as soon as I woke up in the morning, I opened my window and looked outside to see who was right: Jean-Jacques, or Météo France. Unfortunately, it was Météo France that had got the forecast right. Yet Jean-Jacques was undaunted in his optimism over breakfast; it was definitely going to stop raining soon! 

Just in case it didn't, I donned all my waterproof layers, threw the high-visibility vest over the top of it all, and asked Rita to take my picture in this elegant garb before setting off in the rain. It was not raining very hard, so I took a detour through the centre of the village before leaving Fontvieille. 

Covered marketplace 

The main problem with walking in the rain is getting your phone wet. When you're using your mobile phone as a camera and an essential aid to navigation as well as for ordinary communication, it becomes a problem if it is unresponsive to cold, wet fingers or goes crazy whenever a drop of rain falls on the screen. My next phone will definitely be a rugged smartphone, to eliminate such problems. But in the meantime, I decided it was too complicated to navigate my way to Daudet's windmill - which I remember seeing last time I passed through Fontvieille, in 2017 on the Via Aurelia / GR 653A route. Only at that time, when I sat eating my picnic lunch right beside the windmill, I didn't realise it was the windmill that Daudet lived in, and I hadn't read his book Lettres de mon moulin, so it was just a pretty windmill to me! 

On that occasion, and again today, I failed to find the exact spot where the Via Aurelia/GR 653A and the Via Domitia/GR 653D trails converge. Or perhaps there is no special sign to mark this point. In any case, I had to be careful not to follow the wrong GR trail markers and end up walking out of town... and find myself heading back home, on foot, along the coastal trail that I walked nine years ago! 

Having decided it was too wet to go out of my way to look for the mill, I set off out of town along the promisingly named Route d'Arles, which was a fine road to walk on as it had both a cycling lane and a broad, grassy shoulder to walk on beyond that. I didn't have to worry about wet grass, in my waterproof socks and over-trousers. I was briefly distracted by a road sign indicating the presence of a Roman aqueduct, which I turned off the road to see, before realising that: 1. I had already passed the point where I would have seen the aqueduct had I stayed on the GR trail, and 2. I had seen the Roman aqueduct the last time I walked this stage, which is shared by both the GR 653D and the GR 653A. It wasn't particularly impressive, as Roman aqueducts go, and I wasn't going out of my way, in the rain, to see it again! If you would like to see a picture of it anyway, check out my description of my last day walking into Arles in 2017, available here. I did, however, see a very impressive earthworm, which almost made this otherwise futile detour worthwhile! 

Back on the main road, I arrived at the Abbaye de Montmajour - half an hour before it was due to open. Having been unable to visit last time I came through, on account of it being a Monday, the weekly closure, I was determined to see the abbey this time. I went down into the parking lot, where there was a café, but it appeared to be just as firmly closed as the abbey itself, so there was nothing for it but to stand and wait for half an hour in the rain, under a somewhat permeable tree. 

It was worth the wait! Definitely stop in, and pay the admission fee, if you are walking either of the two routes into Arles. 

Montmajour has always been a place of pilgrimage. Proud owners of a piece of the True Cross, the monks established the site as a place of pilgrimage in the eleventh century, thereby increasing the abbey's influence and prosperity. On May 3rd of every year, the archbishop of Arles absolved of their sins everyone who journeyed to Montmajour to pray - and left a donation to finance the building of the abbey church of Notre-Dame. By the twelfth century, the pilgrims had become so numerous there wasn't room for them all in the crypt, and so the monks built the Chapel of the Holy Cross to accommodate them. Pilgrimage featured significantly in the local economy, as businesses in Arles provided accommodation, food and transportation services for thousands of pilgrims, seeing as Arles was also a stopping point on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela - just as it is today. 

Graves dug directly into the rock

The hermitage of Saint Peter is the oldest surviving part of the monastery complex, dating back to the middle of the eleventh century and partly dug into the rock, partly constructed out of it. 

The vast halls of the abbey church are now bare, because following the French revolution and the closing of the monasteries all over France, with seizure of their property by the state, Montmajour was auctioned off in 1791, and purchased by one Élisabeth Roux-Chatelard, who quickly demolished the monastery of Saint-Maur - a part of the complex built in the eighteenth century - and sold off all its fixtures, artworks and furnishings in order to finish paying for the property. "All sorts of doors, windows, panelling, floors and frames had disappeared [..] she had even sold the tiles and rubble!" remarked the outraged Pierre Véran, archaeologist and first curator of the Arles Museum of Antiquity, in 1795. But to no avail: Elisabeth was unable to complete the payments, and the abbey was put up for auction again in 1793. Etienne Roche bought the property and divided it into over 200 plots, sold to 28 different owners in 1795. The building was then used as a convenient source of ready-cut stone for the construction of various buildings in the area. The surviving constructions were used as craftsmen's workshops, haylofts and sheepfolds, causing further deterioration, until a series of restoration projects began in the late nineteenth century; the state took over the complex in 1945 and made it the national monument that it is today. 

The cloister is one of the best-preserved and most interesting parts of the complex, not only for its Romanesque carved capitals but for the historic graffiti on its walls. The symbols scratched into the stone walls include a series of sailboats, dating back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries; it's unclear whether they are ex-votos giving thanks for a safe passage, symbols of a pilgrimage undertaken by sea, or what. Alongside these are specimens of less old, but still historic graffiti dating from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The rest of the walk into Arles was not very exciting: mostly following the main road, sometimes on a path through the undergrowth beside it and sometimes, uncharacteristically for a GR trail, on the road itself. Coming into the outskirts of the city, I crossed a major roundabout and then followed the canal for a while - I could have walked beside it all day, but then I would have missed the Abbey of Montmajour. I then followed Avenue de Stalingrad into the city centre, taking a quick detour to the banks of the Rhône, where I had a view of the starting point for the continuation of this walk in the Spring! 

But in the meantime, a hot shower and a bowl of soup were in order! Having secured permission for an early check-in at my miniscule "studio" flat in the city centre, I was able to warm up and dry out right away, making a meal out of instant tomato soup, with stale bread grilled in a frying pan and cut into croutons, sprinkled with thyme picked along the trail and the last of my Comte cheese.

Fontvielle - Abbaye de Montmajour - Arles 

10 km + (GPS tracker stopped working for a while in the rain!)

Total Via Domitia Vercelli - Arles: 700 km in 37 days