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.