Avignon

I arrived in Avignon at the end of the day, when the low sun was turning the ramparts the color of old rope. The train station sits just outside the walls — you walk through a gate and then you are simply inside it, in a city that has been enclosed for seven hundred years, where the streets are narrower than you expect and the plane trees cast a shade that feels almost deliberate. The Palais des Papes appeared at the end of a long straight street and I stopped walking for a moment just to take its scale in. It is not a beautiful building in the expected sense — it is massive and pale and slightly austere, more fortress than residence — but it has a presence that is genuinely hard to stand next to without feeling something shift in you.

The famous bridge — the Pont Saint-Bénézet, the one from the song every French child learns — extends about halfway across the Rhône and then simply stops, its broken arches hanging over the water without apology. It has been this way since the seventeenth century. The tourists photograph themselves on it and the tour guides explain what happened and then everyone moves on, but I found it oddly moving: a bridge that no longer bridges anything, preserved as a monument to incompletion. Standing on the last arch, looking west toward the Languedoc bank, the river was moving fast and grey-green below, and a heron was fishing in the shallows with absolute patience.

The market at Les Halles runs every morning and smells exactly as a Provençal market should: rotisserie chicken fat, aged cheese, fresh thyme in bundles so dense they look like green fists. I ate a wedge of socca from a stall — the chickpea pancake that appears at the border between Provence and Liguria, crisp at the edges, soft in the centre, scattered with black pepper and olive oil — and drank a small espresso at the zinc counter of a café where an old man was reading the newspaper with the intensity of someone looking for a specific insult. The coffee was sharp and strong. Nobody spoke to me and it was perfect.

Avignon in late July is a different city entirely — the Festival d’Avignon fills every courtyard and cloister with theatre companies from forty countries, and the streets pulse with a peculiar energy that mixes art-world intensity with tourist confusion. Even if you are not going to see a single performance, arriving during the festival and walking the city at eleven at night, when the mistral has dropped and the stones are still releasing the day’s heat, is one of the stranger pleasures Provence offers.

When to go: April and May are quiet and luminous, the plane trees just leafing out. July brings the festival and its particular electricity — beautiful but crowded. September empties the crowds without losing the warmth; the restaurants relax, and the light over the Rhône in the evenings reaches something close to perfect.