Tag Archives: avignon

Skip this if you’re not a museum person

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We love museums. History and art are our favorites, and everywhere we go we spend hours in museums. Really. They are restful, mind-expanding, educational, and for us just plain fun.

I will now tell you about the museums of Avignon and tomorrow will add a bit about Villeneuve-Lez-Avignon. There are some great ones.

Our first day in Avignon we stopped at the Office de Tourisme and discovered there are four free museums—we visited three of them that first day. David and I are into Roman history and we had several day trips we had planned to see Roman ruins. And here we find out that there is a museum of Roman artifacts, Lapidaire Musee, a few doors from the Office de Tourisme. And free! We headed right over there and wow, what a lovely experience if you like Roman stuff.

A single soaring room filled, without feeling crowded, with all these amazing items that were excavated in Avignon, most in the mid 1800s. Best of all as you can see nothing is behind a barrier (except glassware and little ceramics) so you can walk right up and see things close. There was another couple in there with us and I said offhand to the woman “Incroyable, oui?” She nods yes and asks me if I am Spanish—doubtless due to my lousy accent. I say I do speak Spanish thinking that is what she speaks. She asks me where in Spain I am from. I say California, and ask her if SHE is from Spain. No, they are from France. Then we have a mish mash conversation, a melange of French and Spanish. We smile and laugh, then I hear her explaining to her husband what THAT was all about. Needless to say through this first week my French has come more easily and my accent has improved tremendously.

Anyway, get a load of this Roman mosaic. So beautiful.

Next we headed uphill to the Palais de Papes and across the plaza to the Musee Petit Palais. This is a relatively small museum, free, with an extensive collection of medieval paintings, virtually all religious as that’s what artists were expected to paint. The docents were wonderful (yes, I had questions) and were able to follow my French to my delight. But the best part for me was the ground floor exhibit that detailed what the profession of painter entailed in the Middle Ages. The artist who led an atelier with many apprentices was not just an artist and painter. He had to be a project manager, a teacher, a bit of a chemist—mixing colors was an art in itself in addition to a science—and a salesman. Of course! But I had never thought about it and led me to think differently about what art was all about in those days.

Finally, although we were warned it was boring we went inside the Palais de Papes. It is enormous..and we loved it. When you check in you get a tablet that, when aimed at a stand in each room, shows the room as historians believe it looked like in the day. Very cool, and surprising how walls, beams and ceilings were painted as well as the array of furniture. The tablet had loads of information about each room, how it was used, in some cases what it meant. When you get to the chambre de pape (the pope’s bedroom) the uncovered and restored tiles that cover the floor are breathtaking—and they let you walk on them! So neat. We failed to take any pictures inside so you’ll have to visit yourself. It is definitely NOT boring.

We arrive and explore Avignon

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This medieval city, with its circling wall, lovely walking streets, and hospitable people grabbed us from the first morning as we set out for coffee. We had arrived late Tuesday after about 24 hours of travel, easily settled into Hotel Cloitre Saint Louis, and after a quick, delicious, albeit Italian, dinner we fell into the very comfy bed and slept 10 hours. Wednesday we quickly found a sweet little coffee and pastry place, Le Saint Chocolat, and enjoyed our breakfast of croissants and coffee so much we came back every morning this week.

Let‘s be clear, the food here is spectacular. It can’t be that a glass of champagne (for me) and a beer (for David) makes that much of a difference! Our first lunch, at unsung Petit Grand, was delectable. Our supper of soup and tartines (open faced sandwiches) perfect and in a little place right out of a French movie. The lunch in Avignon Villeneuve (across the Rhône), where we sat outside in the little square and talked travel and politics with the folks sitting at the next table—the man so happy to have a chance to speak English and sigh about the turn of events in the US (“This sure isn’t the America of 1945 that saved us from the Nazis, is it?”), and the food scrumptious. Lunch today might have topped them all, but that might also be that for me speaking French is beginning to flow and it made the food—the creamiest of carrot soups and baked goat cheese with honey for David, pate en croute and beef tartare for me—even better. Yeah, great eating that is frankly superior to typical American food in a tourist-y city, ooh la la is all I can say and yes, they say that here.

Yesterday we stopped in the Office de Tourisme to ask about getting a bus to Villeneuve-Lez-Avignon, the “new town” across the Rhône, and the very cordial young woman told us to get off at the Office de Tourisme there and noted that it was market day. We did, and there was the market, right across from the bus stop. Now, we consider the Grand Lake farmers market in Oakland to be pretty darned good, but this one put it to shame. Just watching the French talk, laugh, buy (and everyone seems to reuse containers—glass jars handed over to be filled with olives, bags to be filled with bread, little containers to be filled with humus), and laugh and talk some more was enough entertainment. Drooling over the produce—and the seeming endless array of olives, too—was fun and it made us hungry for lunch. There was even a stand that squeezed fresh juice on the spot.

Though I could have gone straight to a restaurant David was more rational and suggested we head to the castle that we could see from the market.

This small town overflows with history and we marched through a lot of it in the one day we had. The gradual climb to the castle was lovely.

When we got there we thought about whether to buy a ticket but went to the billeteria to see what the deal was. We were quickly convinced to buy 2 twenty euro multi-site tickets and started with the “abbey” and its gardens. Alas, the website for this amazing place is really awful and the information about the restoration in the early twentieth century is buried. The fascinating parts to us are the purchase by a lovely painter, Gustave Fayet, a woman for whom he bought the abbey, Elsa Koenerle, who made it her lifelong work to restore the abbey and especially the gardens with her lifelong “close friend” who lived with them, Genia Lioubow. The gardens are gorgeous, even in their very early spring state. We wandered for at least an hour before walking back down to the square for lunch.

The abbey ground floor where they all lived is now a gallery of Fayet’s painting and drawings. They are lovely. I include here only one, a portrait of his wife and baby.

The next post will cover a few of the museums in Avignon and Villeneuve-Lez-Avignon. After several long days I am heading to bed.