Marseille to Genoa

My modest but highly serviceable B&B had its own honeycomb at breakfast!  Indeed, they were all probably bee-lovers: there were bees stencilled onto the elevator.

I'm determined to redeem Marseille from its presence in my life in 1975, and I'll be back next week - and I'm so looking forward.  I had time for a couple of hours walking around this morning.  I loved this end of block shaped not like a flatiron, but like a lighthouse or tower of Babel (don't worry about the fire engines - there was a fire station there).  

She gets everywhere.

And Marseille has its very own Arc de Triomphe! It has a very checkered history: it was - says Wikipedia - "initially conceived in 1784 to honour Louis XVI and to commemorate the Peace of Paris (1783) that ended the American Revolutionary War. Following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814–15, the project was resumed in 1823, now to commemorate French victories in the Spanish Expedition, notably at the Battle of Trocadero, August 31, 1823. It was eventually completed in 1839, with a more general theme of victory."  It's not only complicated, but a little lost and stranded among apartment blocks and garages.

Marseille is well known for its street art: here's just a bit of it.  In particular, they paint those clangy iron grilles that come down over shop fronts - and not everything is easy to decipher.

Some designs are content to be pretty.

And sometimes, it's like here is all of Marseille, in a nutshell.

I'll spare you the full and gory details of the train journey here (I think it involved only four trains, but it might as well have been seventy): the first was delayed by 35 minutes, because of fire alongside the tracks (before Marseille), which put all of my carefully calibrated connections seriously out of joint.  In the end, I was only two hours later getting to Genoa than I'd expected - because Europe has functioning train services - but there was barely any daylight left.  My hotel - opened in 1897 - seems to be stuck, or at least period-renovated - at the same date, apart, mercifully, for the Nespresso machine: I feel, even in the shiny leather share on which I'm seated at the ... desk? vanity table? ... time-shafted back to about 1910, and pre-war Europe.