Avignon

I arrived in Avignon on a July evening, stepping off the TGV into air that smelled of hot stone and lavender from some unseen vendor on the platform. The ramparts — the remparts — appeared almost immediately, a pale limestone wall stretching further than seemed reasonable for a city this size, fourteen towers intact after seven centuries. They do not feel like ruins. They feel like a statement.

The Palace and the Weight of It

Nothing quite prepares you for the Palais des Papes. I had seen photographs, of course, but photographs cannot convey scale in a place like this. Standing in the Grand Tinel — the banquet hall where cardinals ate and conspired — I felt the particular vertigo of rooms built for power rather than comfort. The walls are bare now, the frescoes mostly gone, but that bareness amplifies something. The stone breathes cold even in July.

Lia spent twenty minutes in the chambre du cerf, the study of Clement VI, photographing the hunting frescoes painted directly onto plaster — deer leaping through painted water, falconers, fishing boats — delicate and almost tender against the palace’s outer severity. We both kept returning to them.

The festival had taken over the courtyard of honor when we visited. Bleachers, rigging, cables everywhere — the kind of organized chaos that theatre people thrive in. I had not expected to find a dress rehearsal in progress, a company working through a Molière in the late heat, actors projecting across empty seats while stagehands shouted measurements at each other. We watched from a doorway for longer than we should have.

Rue des Teinturiers and the River Below the Bridge

The part of Avignon I kept returning to was the Rue des Teinturiers — the dyers’ street — a narrow canal-side lane where water-wheels still hang over the stream, mossy and half-submerged. The plane trees close overhead. On a hot afternoon it is the coolest street in the city, and the light comes through green.

I ate a tian here, at a small place without a sign I can now reconstruct, the Provençal gratin of layered courgette and tomato that tastes of preserved summer. Simple food that requires excellent tomatoes. Avignon in July has excellent tomatoes.

The Pont Saint-Bénézet — the famous bridge, Sur le Pont d’Avignon — stops halfway across the Rhône. This I knew. What I did not know was how strange it feels to stand at that broken edge and look out over the water at nothing, the far bank unreachable, the bridge simply ending in open sky.

When to go: July brings the Festival d’Avignon and extraordinary energy, though accommodation books months ahead. May and September offer the same light and heat with far more room to breathe inside the palace.