Arles; Saturday, 09 November, 2024

I had a pretty decent lie-in, mostly to try and sleep through the worst of the early morning rain, so that by the time I’d had breakfast and was ready to leave the hotel it was just down to the occasional spit.

My first stop of the morning was the Alyscamps, the former Roman necropolis that would have been located on the edge of the road out of the city. Over the years the area of the necropolis has been reduced, and many of the tombs desecrated with the stone coffins being reused by farmers as cattle troughs. For a while the area was also turned into a convent with a number of chapels built, but these eventually moved back into the city with the last of the chapels the Eglise Saint-Honorat à Arles now a slightly creepy partial ruin at the very end of the site.

From the Alyscamps I headed back into the centre of town, heading up through the Porte d'Auguste, another of the city’s old gates before wandering over to the Thermes de Constantin to have a proper look around them, including inside. I spent quite a bit of time looking round them, and could have spent longer, but by now the rain had started so I decided to head over the road to the neighbouring Musée Réattu to spend some time in the dry looking round that.

With the rain starting to ease off a little bit I headed back across town to the central square to visit the Cloître Saint-Trophime. This is the two storey cloister of the cathedral that is now open as a separate attraction from the church itself. Inside there are a couple of exhibition spaces, as well as excellent views of the cathedral tower.

From the cloister it was a very quick walk through the rain over to the Hôtel de Ville, the access point for heading down into the Cryptoportiques d'Arles. These are the former underground storage spaces for the Roman Forum when it was on the site, and it’s quite weird to wander round an underground space that’s been standing for nearly 2,000 years. The area wraps around three sides of a large rectangle, tracing the layout of where the Forum would have been when it was still standing. Whilst the caverns are still standing they aren’t still waterproof and with the rain pounding down above the general creepiness of the space was enhanced by the slow drip, drip of water falling from the ceilings.

From the Crypotportiques it was a short walk round the corner to the second museum of the day, the Museon Arlaten. This is the city’s ethnographic museum which has many exhibits of the traditions and peoples of the Provence region – including several large dioramas, as well as randomly a large former chapel and a major chunk of ruined walls running through it’s courtyard – it’s a slightly weird museum!

It was then a 20 minute walk through the old town and along the river to the final couple of stops of the day, first the very small remains – and it’s mostly just dips in the landscape and a few stones – of the former Roman Circus and next to it the Archaeological museum which was a very impressive museum housing lots of artefacts from across the city, as well as a large Gallo-Romano barge.

One of the most impressive parts of the museum were the scale models of the five key Roman archaeological sights of the city – The Arena, Theatre, Forum, Circus and Baths – helping to put into context how they would have looked in their heyday.

In the end I didn’t quite see everything in the museum as time finally caught up with me and the museum was closing before I could see everything, but I’d seen most of the key sights so I wasn’t too worried. I headed back into town and stopped off for a quick bite to eat in the old town before heading back to the hotel to freshen up, offload many, many photos and then, after a nightcap, head to bed ready for an early start the following morning.