Old Hands, part 15

The Centro Storico (historic center) of Genoa was on our agenda the next day. We went down Garibaldi Street, which was lined with elegant old palazzi (palaces). We followed a guidebook tour through several old churches, and we saw a little square that was completely surrounded by beautiful medieval buildings. Then we did a kid-oriented afternoon at Genoa’s aquarium, the largest in Europe.

We drove back to France the next morning, stopping first at St-Paul de Vence, a medieval hilltop town north of Cannes. It was full of touristy-looking shops, but there were not hordes of visitors at this cool time of year, so things felt pretty relaxed. “We’re going to a crêpe restaurant for lunch,” we told the kids.

“I don’t think I want that,” Lisa said.

“Me neither,” said Julie.

“You’ve never even had a crêpe!” I said. “Don’t be so silly! We’ll do what we usually do—we’ll order a few different kinds, and you can eat whichever you like the most.” They were grumpy till we actually got to the restaurant and tried the food.

“This isn’t bad,” Julie said of her crêpe filled with curried chicken.

“Wait till you try a dessert crêpe,” Mike said, smiling.

We made another stop at La Napoule, on the coast just west of Cannes, where the guidebook advised us to see the castle built in the early 1900s by an American and his French wife. They were fans of the Middle Ages and of the grotesque, and Mike especially enjoyed their collection of gargoyles, since he was a fellow collector. Finally we arrived at our destination, Nîmes, passing its huge Roman amphitheater on the way to our hotel.

We walked to the amphitheater the next morning, though the brutal Mistral made the sunny day cold. We also saw the Roman temple, the modern art museum, and the pedestrian shopping area of the town. We were disappointed that the city museum didn’t have any fabrics on display—Nîmes had been a textile manufacturing town, the birthplace of denim (“de Nîmes”).

We drove across the Rhône to see a castle, thinking we’d picnic outside, but when we got out of the car the cold Mistral forced us back in. We ate in the car with the wind roaring around us. Then we drove up to Les Baux de Provence, a ruined medieval hilltop fortress. The wind there was fierce, and the signs in French warned of a vent violent (violent wind). From there we drove to Avignon, arriving just in time for a fine hour-long tour of the Pope’s palace. This had been the residence of seven Avignon-dwelling Popes and the two anti-Popes. The Old Palace section was very plain, built by a Cistercian monk, but the New Palace section was decorated more elaborately, with frescoes and Gothic ornamentation. We also saw the pont d’Avignon of the children’s song, a half-built bridge that hung over the river.

By Good Friday the Provence villages were full, not of tourists, but of French people at their weekend homes. In Uzes and Île sur la Sorgue we saw antiques fairs and people lingering in sidewalk cafés. Everyone seemed friendly—not like Parisians at all. And outside Uzes we ran across Mike’s idea of a pot of gold: an architectural salvage yard. This was the kind of place where he liked to look for gargoyles, and he found a real prize—a carved stone monster that had been part of the gutter system for the building it had come from, designed to carry water off the roof and away from the building’s foundation.

“I want to buy it,” Mike said.

“How will we get it home?” I asked. “We have to go on a plane.”

“Well, maybe it can be shipped,” Mike suggested. “Ask the guy!”

“Oh, God, my French is not equal to this,” I whined. But I tried.

Pretty quickly we agreed on a price equivalent to $300, which we would pay if the guy could arrange for shipment to Madrid. Unfortunately, he could not get hold of his trucker using the mobile phone, so there was no way to assure shipping. However, he said he’d been thinking about driving down to Spain later in the spring, so maybe he’d bring it down to us. We exchanged names and addresses, and he gave Mike a plaster gargoyle as a parting gift.

We stopped again, this time at Fontaine de Vaucluse. This was the point at which an underground river sprang out of a mountain and became a regular river. It was an unusual sight, with the pure, clear water spraying right out of the rock.

Finally we reached our last base, Aix-en-Provence. We’d spent a little money on our hotel, which was a renovated 15th-century abbey. It was comfortable, pretty and well located, just off the Cours Mirabeau (known as the Champs-Elysées of Aix), which was lined with shops and restaurants.

The town of Aix was not especially old, but it was beautiful, with harmonious architecture and color everywhere, from the flower and vegetable markets to the shop awnings. We walked through the pedestrian shopping area of the town the next day, buying a few items. We drove the Route Cézanne, which took us through some of the landscapes the artist had painted. The day was sunny and warm, and the red earth and green fields really looked like their Cézanne-rendered counterparts.

Finally, on Easter Sunday, we drove back to Marseille and spent an hour walking around the picturesque harbor, looking at the fishmongers there, hearing the church bells. “The logistics of traveling with the kids really worked on this trip,” I told Mike.

“It’s the dinner time,” he said. “When you can eat at 8 p.m. instead of 10 p.m., everything goes smoothly.”

“It was the menus, too,” I said. “They could get pizza or pasta almost anywhere we went. You can’t do that in Spain.”