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 ...