Moustiers-Sainte-Marie
"Nobody can tell you for certain why the star is there, and somehow that's the best part of the story."
A village wedged into a limestone gorge with a star suspended on a chain between two cliffs above it, famous for centuries for the painted pottery still fired in its workshops.
We drove into Moustiers at the end of a long day skirting the Gorges du Verdon, half-hypnotized by turquoise water two hundred metres below the road, and the village itself still managed to stop the conversation. It’s built directly into a cleft in the limestone, houses stacked along a stream that comes straight off the cliff in a small waterfall, and above the whole thing, strung on an iron chain between two rock faces, hangs a gilded star.
A star nobody can fully explain
Ask five people in Moustiers why the star is there and you’ll get five stories — a crusader knight’s vow, a lovestruck troubadour, a chain replaced so many times over the centuries that its original purpose is genuinely lost. What’s certain is that it’s been re-hung after falling at least twice, most recently in the 1990s, and that it appears in essentially every photo taken of the village, including several hundred of ours. We climbed the steep path up to the chapel of Notre-Dame de Beauvoir directly beneath it, out of breath and thoroughly rewarded by the view back down over the terracotta roofs.
Four hundred years of painted clay
Moustiers gave its name to a whole category of French faience — the tin-glazed earthenware, typically painted in blue or polychrome hunting scenes, that the village has produced since a monk supposedly brought the secret of the glaze back from Faenza, Italy, in the 1600s. A dozen or so ateliers still work in the old technique, and we spent an hour in one watching a potter paint a hunting scene freehand onto a plate with a brush about three hairs wide, no sketch, no correction. We bought a small bowl we are both terrified of breaking.
When to go: Shoulder season — May or late September — pairs well with a Gorges du Verdon road trip before or after, and the village gets uncomfortably crowded with day-trippers by midday in high summer.