Provence

I arrived in Provence for the first time on an early July morning, stepping off a train in Avignon into air that already tasted of thyme and heat. I had spent months in Paris the year before, and nothing had prepared me for how different this felt — not a different city, but almost a different country. The light was sharper, the shadows blacker, the stone of the old walls a color somewhere between honey and bone. Within an hour I understood why painters kept coming back here and never quite leaving.

The lavender is real. I know that sounds obvious, but so much of Provence has been reproduced in kitchen calendars and Côte d’Azur perfume advertisements that you half expect the actual thing to be a letdown. It isn’t. Driving the D900 through the Luberon in late June, the fields between Apt and Roussillon are so intensely purple they seem almost artificial, the rows perfectly parallel, the smell so thick it hits you through a closed car window. I stopped at a farm outside Saignon and bought a small bottle of essential oil from a woman who looked like she had been standing in that doorway since roughly the Second World War. The oil cost four euros. It was the best thing I bought in three weeks.

What keeps me thinking about Provence is not the scenery, which is obvious, but the food, which is less famous than it deserves to be. Not the grande cuisine of the starred restaurants in Gordes, but the market food — the socca in Cours Saleya in Nice, the tapenade spread thick on rough bread in a village bar at noon, the slow-cooked daube de boeuf I ate in a Luberon auberge that had been run by the same family since the 1960s. And the rosé, which in Provence is not the pale, self-conscious thing served at fashionable restaurants elsewhere — here it is simply what you drink, without ceremony, in a terracotta jug, for lunch.

When to go: Late May through June is the window I’d defend most. The lavender is beginning to bloom, the crowds are manageable, and the temperatures have not yet crossed into the kind of heat that empties the villages by midday. September is equally good — harvest season, lighter tourist traffic, and the afternoon light is extraordinary. Avoid August entirely unless you enjoy sharing every single village square with tour groups and paying triple for a mediocre room.

What most guides get wrong: They route you through the Luberon villages — Gordes, Les Baux, Roussillon — and call it Provence. These places are beautiful, no question, but they have also been completely polished for visitors. The Provence I find more interesting is the one between those landmarks: the market towns of Apt and Forcalquier, the back roads through the Alpilles, the stretch of the Rhône valley above Avignon where there are no boutique hotels and the cafés still have Formica tables. That Provence is quieter and takes more effort to find, and it is the one that stays with you.