Italy to Santiago II Part 1: Via Domitia Day 35 Eygalières - Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

Qui veut voyager loin ménage sa monture 

(If you wish to travel far, take care of your steed)

- Jean Racine, Les Plaideurs (1668)

A short and easy day, to give my trusty steed a break; but with plenty to see and do! 

The town of Eygalières was much quieter on a Monday morning than it had been during the Sunday afternoon flea market. I climbed to the ruins of the castle and the old church - now an exhibition space - at the top end of the town, seeing as I had neglected to go up there yesterday, at the end of a 26-kilometre day.

I headed back down and out of the village along a minor road, then turned onto one of those long, winding dirt roads through the pine trees and kermes oak that I remember as typical of this area. I crossed yet another Roman bridge and proceeded along a rather muddy dirt track at the base of the Alpilles. 

I walked around an aérodrome and along a gravel road through the estate of Château Le Romanin, with its vast vineyards and olive groves, where workers were spreading huge nets under the trees in preparation for the harvest.

Houses began to appear along the road, with gardens surrounded by solid walls, Middle Eastern style - another feature of this part of France that I remember noting on my previous walk. Well privacy works both ways: I didn't have to worry about the inhabitants seeing me pee in the bushes right across from their house! 😅The houses appeared closer and closer together, and I emerged from the woods beside a hospital. Not just any hospital: the institution for the mentally ill where Vincent Van Gogh was a patient in the final year of his life. 

Saint-Paul-de-Mausole was originally a monastery, built in 1082 and occupied since then by monks and nuns of various orders; it was the Franciscan friars who first started taking in dementia patients, in the 1600s. In the aftermath of the French revolution the property was seized and the monks evicted, but in 1807 it was purchased by one Dr. Mercurin, who reopened it as a psychiatric hospital. When Van Gogh checked himself in on May 8, 1889, he had the good fortune to be under the care of Dr. Théophile Peyron, director of the institution, an enlightened physician who realised that painting was more than just a hobby for Van Gogh and encouraged him to keep it up. Aided by the financial support of his brother Theo, Vincent did not sleep in a dormitory like the majority of the patients, but had a room of his own. Three rooms, in fact: one as his bedroom, one as his studio, when he was not painting en plein air, and one for storing the 143 canvases and 150 drawings he completed during his year in the institution - the final year of his life. After living at Saint-Paul for just over a year, Van Gogh discharged himself; a month later, he was dead, having shot himself in a wheat field at the age of 37.

Dr. Peyron's office

The cell occupied by the mother superior, Sœur Épiphane 

Vincent Van Gogh's private room

Not much later, the hospital was home to another illustrious guest: Dr. Albert Schweizer, winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize, was interned here with his wife in 1918, when the men's pavilion of the hospital was used as a prisoner of war camp.

Dr. Albert Schweizer's room

This part of the hospital,  along with the adjacent Romanesque chapel and cloister, has been preserved as a museum and cultural centre open to visitors, but the rest is still a functioning hospital, and one may encounter patients wandering about the halls or the garden. So a sign said, though the people I encountered all looked like tourists!

I left this historic institution and crossed the street to visit the next sight on my itinerary, known to locals as Les Antiques: the principal monuments of the ancient Roman town of Glanum.

 

Glanum was a fortified town or oppidum built between the fourth amd second centuries BC by the Salyens, the largest of the Celto-Ligurian tribes that inhabited Provence. A shrine to the Celtic god Glanus was built at the site of a spring known for its healing powers, and the town grew around it. The people of Glanum were in contact with the Greek colony of Massalia, present day Marseille, which had been founded in about 600 BC, and this influenced the architecture of the town, giving it a distinctly Hellenistic flavour. But by the second century BC the Salyens of Glanum were no longer getting along so well with the Greeks of Massalia, who called upon their Roman allies for help; in 125 BC the Salyens were defeated by the Roman army. Many of the old Gallo-Hellenic buildings and monuments of Glanum were destroyed and replaced with Roman structures. The Roman town prospered due to the popularity of its spring and its vicinity to the Via Domitia, until the Salyens rebelled against Roman in 90 BC and the rebellion was crushed, destroying many of the town's major buildings. 

When Julius Caesar captured Massilia from the Greeks in 49 BC, the romanisation of Provence began. The Mausoleum of Glanum, a towering monument dedicated to members of the Julii family and veterans of Caesar's Gallic Wars, was constructed at this time, and the Glanum dam and aqueduct were built shortly thereafter. 

In AD 260 the Alamanni overran the town, which was abandoned and gradually covered over with mud and sediments that accumulated after the Roman drainage system fell into disrepair. The inhabitants built a new town a kilometre or so to the north, present-day Saint-Remy-de-Provence; as no further construction took place on the site of the Roman city, it remained preserved underneath the sediments. Occasional excavations took place as early as the 16th and 17th centuries, removing sculptures and coins, but the site was not systematically excavated until the years between 1921 and 1941. 

The archaeological site is closed on Mondays, so I didn't get to see all the ruins, but the most imposing of these, the mausoleum and arch referred to locally as Les Antiques, stand beside the road for all to see, right across from Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. 

From here it was only one more kilometre, straight ahead and downhill, to Saint-Remy-de-Provence. Panels along the way are illustrated with images that Van Gogh painted while in Saint-Remy, set in the very landscape that inspired them.

Saint-Remy must be a very busy town in tourist season, judging from the number of shops selling kitsch souvenirs and "Provençal" linens - nearly all of which were closed today, either because it's Monday, or because it's November. A few hardy tourists braved the chilly Mistral wind blowing through the streets, trying on warm hats and scarves in the shops and huddling over hot drinks and pastries in the pâtisserie. I also stopped in for a hot chocolate, and to use the wifi (which didn't work), and I heard German and English spoken as well as French. Then I returned to my lodgings to do laundry: my miniature apartment on the main square, right across from the town hall, has a washing machine! As well as a perfectly equipped kitchen, where I had made myself a late lunch when I first arrived: spaghetti with spinach and mushrooms, made with a tasty local olive oil that was provided in the apartment. Followed by a chestnut pudding, from the "Utile" supermarket on the way into town. Dinner will be quiche from the pâtisserie, with the rest of the spinach and mushrooms as a side salad,  and what remains of a miniature bottle of wine!

Pictures of this lunch, and of the apartment, to be added tomorrow: the wifi doesn't work in the apartment, either!

Ma maison

View of the square from my window

Eygalières -  Saint-Remy-de-Provence 16 km

Italy to Santiago II Part 1: Via Domitia Day 34 Robion - Eygalières

I am totally present in my world when I walk, fully immersed, my edges blending with the edges of everything around me so that I am no longer separate from them. When I walk, I belong.

- Brenda Williams, Walking home, published in The Walker Within (2000)

It has taken me three days to walk past the Luberon: a long, low massif, extending for 60 kilometres from east to west, with a width of five kilometres and a maximum altitude of only 1125 metres. I have walked along its base on the northern side, through the valley of the Calavon, temporarily abandoning the Durance,  which flows along the southern side of the massif.

The Luberon is characterised primarily by rounded, rolling slopes, but at its western end, the massif terminates in the jagged, rocky cliffs that tower above Robion. 

Unlike my companions at the hostel Gíte l'Escanson, who were heading up onto the mountain to hike, I followed a nice flat cycling route across the valley to Taillades. I didn't go out of my way to visit the old part of the village, which was some way off my route and higher up, but I did walk past a beautiful old mill with a fully operational waterwheel, constructed in 1859 to grind madder for red dye.

I walked beside the canal that powered the mill and followed the cycling route to Cavaillon, where I got back onto the GR 653D, having left it yesterday to detour to the hostel in Robion. There wasn't much going on in the old centre of Cavaillon on a Sunday morning; the cathedral was shut, and so were all the local businesses. 

Cavaillon's most interesting monument is a Roman triumphal arch, dating back to the first century of the Christian era; there are some restaurants and cafés in the square in front of it. But the rest of the town centre seemed somewhat abandoned and run down, with a lot of vacant storefronts and very few people about; I discovered why when I continued along the trail and passed through a thriving but ugly and unwalkable district of big box stores and giant supermarkets, with a McDonald's and - walkers take note - a Decathlon store. I didn't fancy a burger, and  my gear is all doing fine, so I kept going, making my way across a busy roundabout and crossing a long bridge over the Durance - there it is again! Having grown to maturity, a broad, slow river with plenty of bends and islands. 

The bridge became a viaduct taking me over the railway tracks and a highway to a small road, which I walked down all the way to Orgon. When I was almost there I discovered that there are some small differences between the GPS tracks that I loaded into different applications: one that I downloaded from the web site of the Amis de Saint-Jacques, which followed the road here, and the official track of the GR 653D downloaded from GR-Infos, which had followed the river instead of the road. That would probably have been more scenic! In any case, I reached Orgon and took some time to look around the village, then sat down on a bench for a picnic consisting of Comte cheese, an apple, and a Snickers ice cream bar (my favourite!) from a convenience store.

I didn't walk up to the ruins of the Templar castle at the top of the town, or the sanctuary even higher up, but continued down the road towards my destination for the day. Orgon marks the start of a new mountain chain, the Alpilles, meaning "little Alps", and I noted the change in the landscape. In fact, I found it felt familiar: I walked through similar territory just over to the south of the Alpilles in 2017. In fact, I had an adventurous day, one of the most memorable on my previous walk from Italy to Santiago, just over on the other side of those hills! The rocky landscape, pine trees and aromatic undergrowth brought back memories of that day; even the names of the towns were similar: in 2017 I passed through Eyguières, whereas today I stopped in Eygalières. On both occasions the similarity of the names annoyed me, confusing me in my search for accommodations! 

I straightened out a bend in the GR 653D trail by walking along a road, and discovered I was by no means the first to do so; in fact, so many people had walked beside the road that there was a footpath, clearly much-used, in the grass beside it, complete with GR trail markings. Then the trail left the paved road to follow a gravel road through the pine groves, vineyards and olive trees. 

After what seemed like a very long time, the gravel road came out onto the paved road into Eygalières, and here I took a brief detour to the 12th-century chapel of Sainte-Sixte.  I sat for a while in the portico, sheltered from the wind; the chapel glowed bright yellow in the late afternoon sun.

From the chapel, the good people of Eygalières have marked out a trail through the trees to keep pilgrims from walking on the road; a very nice idea, but it took me to the top end of the town, when my accommodation was at the bottom. It was good to walk through the town centre, though, because there was a vide-grenier going on: a flea market, special edition for the November 1st holiday, and there were plenty of people strolling about the town centre and sitting in the sun outside the cafés. 

I did the same, sitting with a beer outside the Café de la Place, enjoying the sunshine until my glass was empty and my table was no longer in the sun. Then I paid up and headed for my Airbnb room, in Vanessa's apartment near the town centre. I have a small room with a single bed, though she also rents a larger room with a double bed; the bathroom and kitchen are shared. 

I'm off to the shared kitchen to heat up my Thsi noodle soup!

Robion - Eygalières 26.5 km