variegated hotel responses

La Posada, Winslow - Moth is happy to be here, and Gramsci - whoa - is that a dog barking down the corridor?  THAT SOUNDS JUST LIKE SANTA FE ANIMAL SHELTER!  TRIGGERING!  (He's calmed down, by now).  I'm not sure that we have - not only do we seem to have lost one of the room keys (long and boring story, but the question remains, how??) and we have had quite the worst meal here that we've had in nineteen years (well, ok, there was the half chilled one served and eaten outside during the pandemic, but that doesn't count ...) - so bad that we complained about the "Caesar salad" - wet lettuce, some pimento, one thin slice of cheese crispbread - but no advertised pepitas, no cheese, no - most certainly no - anchovy, and each costing $15 - and this has been just fine, in the past.  Sad.  (and, since you asked, not comped, after our complaint).  Nor were the entrees what they might have been, to say the least - or rather, what they have been.  Other than that ... we're on our way to NM ...

 

Gramsci, in his tunnel

He is, I have to admit, ridiculous,  He's four and a bit, and I don't think I've ever known such a ridiculous cat.  But I do adore him.

 

lavender and sage

Back home ... to find that everything purple in the garden (and some other things as well, of course) have grown about a foot in my absence.  And the garden smells so beautiful ... the herbs, and then there's jasmine in bloom, as well.  And two strawberries were eaten by me - small and tasty - and thankfully they'd not been munched by raccoon, rabbit, nor any other snack-seeking critter.

 

breakfast to bedtime

it's been a long lomg day ... but I'm Back!

 

Marseille day 2

A long walk up the Canebière - Marseille's main street - to start the day, with a detour into the market.  This used to be the main street, anyway - I don't know if there's now a mainer one, because this is fairly run down (though no less interesting for that).  In the C19th it was notorious for the sewage that would run down it: it's still whiffy.

The Grand Hotel is very grand - Wagner stayed there (there's a plaque).  On the other hand, it's been closed since 1979.

Some great glimpses up side streets.  Every time I ask it for directions, Google Maps ominously says "steep hills."  I live on a Steep Hill.  These are mild inclines.

I thought that the facade of Tacussel, booksellers and publishers, was much older than it is - it was designed in the 1960s.

Eventually, at the top of another street, I emerged at the    which was rather magnificent -

unlike the Musée des Beaux Arts, which was in the left hand part of it.  I didn't think I'd ever meet a C19th art collection I didn't want to spend hours in, but I met my match, today.  The two highlights were the frescoes by Puvis de Chavannes at the top of the stairs;

an 1853 view of Marseille by Emile Loubon,

which shows it as it's switching gears and developing into a big city - I love the juxtaposition of oxen horns with chimneys.  But this really brings home how before then, it was little more than a port and a market center.

And then a view of the Artist's Studio - maybe the 1880s? - by Joseph Garibaldi (no relation), which pretty much shows the view from where I'm sitting.

However, that was pretty much it.  There's a huge Courbet of a stag, that badly needs cleaning; an ok Daubigny, and everything else is "by a pupil of" and very derivative, or just plain uninteresting.  Not a snail or a dandelion in sight.  And the earlier period rooms were mysteriously closed.  So I was glad to escape briefly to the park behind, which was busily being rewilded.

In the afternoon, a really great boat trip to the Calanques, a large and beautiful national park between here - or Toulon, really - and Cassis (Cassis looked very pretty).

Two pics will have to sum it up in its wildness.

And then a bonus set of views coming back into the harbor.

And that's a wrap.

 

 

Marseille day 1

The steep and narrow streets of Le Panier, above the old port, are covered in graffiti and murals at every level of invention and competence.  But they are ubiquitous.

I was so pleased, at last, to get a glimpse of the real thing.

although doubtless with dreams of aggrandisement.

Then to La Charité - founded to hep the poor in the mid C17th (and the first time I've ever seen Foucault cited in the general information for the general public).

This was home to a wonderful installation by Laure Prouvost called Mère We Sea (yes, pun pun pun) in the chapel: fish swimming around an elongated breast ... the experience was much better than that sounds, because there was a strong soundscape of spiritual/choral chanting overting verbal testimony of people who have long called Marseille home: I'm not doing the ethereal experience justice (and note the deliberate puddle and debris on the chapel floor: this isn't paradise).

The Charité is home to numerous institutes etc, and also hosts work by art students - very glad, in a meta kind of way, to see others who are fascinated by wall ephemera.

It was so hard walking through the Panier quartier without being called out to, visually, every single moment ...

some fairly simple visual statements;

others less so -

and then I came upon the Cathedral, a magnificent late C19th neo-Byzantine, neo-Gothic beast - in part, the reason it looks so familiar is that it's using stone from western Italy, like Carrara marble.

Here you can see the cathedral from Mucem, the wonderful sprawling art complex devoted to art of the Mediterranean, and to seeing the Med as a whole: I don't think that I've ever before been so aware of Marseille's African facing whole.  Here, you can see not just the Cathedral, but the tiny, tiny old Cathedral, just to its right.

In the old fort part of Mucem, there was an excellent fragrant herbal garden - masses of different kinds of thyme, and in there, somewhere, masses of bees.

a strange structure of metal made to look like a twiggy bower.

I'm in here, albeit obliquely...

Walking back from a quite wonderful, memorable dinner at Ourea - I'll spare you the course-by-course pics, but it was one of the best meals I've ever had.

And in the gaps, I've been reading Nicholas Hewitt's The Wicked City - a kind of cultural/historical biography of Marseille, and its relations to the rest of France; and the first of Jean-Claude Lizzo's Trilogie Marseillaise - how come I've never heard of his police procedurals, set here, before?? - and wondering what life would have been like if, a million years ago, Anita Brookner hadn't decided that she didn't want to take any graduate student, the year I turned up at the Courtauld wanting to work on C19th French art ...

 

Camogli to Marseille

A much cloudier morning, but right in the distance you can just see some sunlight hitting Genoa.

It was very hard tugging myself away from Camogli, although I hope I'll be back ... Most of today was spent on trains, although miraculously, after all the havoc traveling east, everything ran on time, changes were on the same platform, and I even ended up taking a final train (from Cannes to Marseille) that was earlier than the one that I was booked onto.

Mind you, I arrived here with plenty of time in which to admire this fine lion on Marseille station: there was a Metro strike, which meant that the taxi queue was very, very long and slow.

However - here's the view from my room;

an endearing blue fish water carafe at dinner;

and a pretty walk round the harbor afterwards.  It's so good to be back in a country where I can more or less speak the language and understand it - at least, no one tries speaking English to me - rather than my halt-and-carry Spanish, or my just about get-by Italian...

 

Camogli

Today was just about a perfect day of solo travel.  This was the view when I got up - with the first beach umbrella being installed at 6.54 a.m.

And this, the view in the other direction.

A couple of hours (necessary) working on my balcony;

Then a half hour boat ride to the former monastery of San Fruttuoso - impressively sited; simple architecture, with some Genoan Gothic.

Entering the monastery, one had to give where one was visiting from, for statistical purposes.

"Los Angeles"

English woman, probably about my age, on a small tour, is nearby.

“Oh, sorry, I hope you don’t mind me overhearing- but did you say you were from Los Angeles?”

“Yes!” (bracing self for question about Riots)

“You’re English, though, aren’t you?  Do you know our Meghan and Harry?”

"Well, Los Angeles is a big city ... I don’t think we really move in the same circles." 

“But do you live near them?”

The view.  One of the things that's most impressive about the monastery - which only started to be restored in the early 1980s - is the attention given to the local environment.  Back in 1915, a whole wing, together with some houses, was demolished in a flash flood (the debris went to make up the current beach), and there have been other episodes since: now, all kinds of inventive anti-erosion schemes are in place.

I sat under some grape vines and drew.

Alas, I didn't see him.  Perhaps not quite a perfect day.

Then I sat and read on a bench on a cliff path, above this - which made me wish that I possessed a swim suit.

Dinner was not just tasty (including a dish of pasta made with chestnut flour, with pesto, potatoes and green beans), but came with the prettiest of plate settings.

a perfect sunset, making this look like a clichéd postcards (when you could buy postcards),

and then the view, again, with clouds.