Provence 2008: Great Things in Avignon

Our tour of Mediterranean France was billed as birding and culture, and to restore the balance, we spent an entire day in Avignon, the medieval city of popes and anti-popes. It was nice to sleep in a little–museums don’t disperse to feed at dawn!–and the short drive from Arles to the site of the “Babylonian captivity” was relaxed and pleasant.

Parking, of course, was less so, but we found spaces (free, no less) for both the vans, then gallant David had to help a young woman squeeze her car into a space that she found intimidatingly narrow; she was grateful, and he was rewarded with a kiss and the applause of the participants.

Meanwhile I was holding one of my deadening dissertations on the history of medieval Provence, and had just reached the bit about the papacy in its 14th-century exile when a colorful parid appeared over our heads: “The election of the anti-pope led to the Great Tit, um, Schism….” Good for a laugh, and we passed through the walls at the Gothic church of St. Agricol and headed to the Palais des Papes.

The Avignon popes built this, the largest Gothic building in the world, around what was already a lavish episcopal residence, and it is a sight to behold.

Even on a weekday in April, the place was crowded, but it is so vast that we found it easy to slip the gangs of schoolchildren and enjoy the elegant spaces in relative tranquility. What everyone really wants to see, of course, are the rooms decorated with Giovanetti’s frescoes, but as always, I found the stripped-down walls and high vaults of some of the empty chapels and meeting rooms more moving.

Too soon it was lunchtime, and we took our noon meal (well, our 1:30 meal) in an outdoor cafe beneath Avignon’s best-known tower.

We had missed the performance of the clockwork automata,but the food was good and the people-watching equally so.

We split into two groups after lunch, one bunch headed to the park above the papal palace, the other to the museum housed in the Petit Palais (modestly so named only in comparison to its extravagant neighbor across the square). The exhibits include a nice selection of architectural ornament from Avignon, none of which photographed well, and a number of galleries representing Italian painters imported by the popes and anti-popes in the fourteenth century. It would be a fine place to go back to time after time, but a single afternoon’s visit tended to make all the madonnas look inevitably the same–except, of course, for this one, painted by a young Botticelli.

Older and pleasingly a bit plumper, the same model would rise from the waves later on as Aphrodite.

We reconvened under the clock tower for some picnic shopping, and the more equestrian-minded among us took advantage of one of the more charming features of every Provençal city, the 19th-century merry-go-round with its painted ponies and trompe-l’oeil caryatids.