Around Avignon

Walking through the plaza by the hotel in Avignon with Sweetie we approached the row of outdoor cafes, sitting right next to each other so that the only way to tell that it was a new cafe was that the chairs were a different color.

This same plaza had a lovely mosaic of a coat of arms...perhaps that of the Pope?

I was able to read the French descriptions of dishes pretty well and I had my handy bookmark sized graphic. I was able, in French (je suis allergic), to tell the waiter who wanted to seat us that I was allergic to dairy, but the graphic helped a lot. The waiter took it to the kitchen and showed the chef and all was well!

Our first meal in what was to become 'our' cafe was a simple herb omelet for me and a pizza for Sweetie. At dinner we both had the special which was an amazing lamb shank with chunks of vegetables, cooked in a slow braise method that yielding meltingly tender lamb and a delicious sauce. Thank heavens that we had plenty of baguette slices to help us enjoy every bit of that sauce. No photo of the lamb shanks, because we were so busy enjoying ourselves that we never thought of it as a photo op.

As long as I'm talking about their food, I have to say I was curious about the mussels (moules in French). Sometimes it seemed like every other table had at least one order of them and you could tell because they came in a large black metal pot...and with an order of frites (fries). This was not true for some of the other cafes in the area, so it seemed like it was a specialty of this cafe. For our last dinner in Avignon I wanted to order them, so I showed the bookmark to the waiter, asked 'moules et frites?' and he smiled and nodded 'yes'. It was an enormous portion of tender mussels with a lovely broth in the bottom of the pot to dip the fries into. If you go to Avignon, try out the moules et frites at Le Forum cafe. Sweetie enjoyed a plate of pasta and meatballs.

Still thinking about food, I have to say that I would have loved to try the brioche loaf

that the Hotel de l'Horloge served at breakfast. Sweetie said it was moist and very rich. He also enjoyed the petit croissants, served in a woven basket. I enjoyed the local honey that was available where they served jams. It went very well on the ever-present baguette.

The plaza has a lovely carousel, which the children especially seemed to enjoy riding, but the adults enjoyed looking at.

There was also the Theatre building which served for lots of cultural performances, including opera and ballet. Here Molière, who was an actor and playwright, watches over the entrance.

The pace was so relaxed that I confess that the various walks we took around town happened on different days, but I can't recall in what order. On one of those days we walked around the old part of town and discovered the traditional French candy Calisson, which is made in the region of Proven, especially in Aix-en-Provence where almonds became an established crop in the 16th century. The Calisson are made from a paste of candied fruit (mostly with a melon-like flavor) and ground almonds, with a thin layer of royal icing on the top. They are shaped almost like an almond and are about two inches long. As you can see from this photo, they come in lots of flavors including chocolate. Since these same candies were known in Italy in medieval times, I wonder if members of the Pope's entourage who came from Italy brought the yearning for them to Provence? 

The same shop had a lot of cookies and hard candies, plus beautiful trays of candied fruits.

Since in two earlier posts I took you through the Palace of the Popes, to the bridge at Avignon remembered in song, to a picnic in the gardens and to the Pont du Garde, as well as a walk through the town that included umbrellas in the air, we probably have had enough of Avignon, so it's time to say goodbye.

Read about those and see the photos at these two posts: HERE and HERE.

Avignon and the Pope

Having probably bored you with too much information about the Romans in Provence, we now jump forward over a thousand years to 1309. In that year the  Pope decided to set up a French version of the Papal seat in Rome. (This is not the first time that the papacy was installed outside of Rome. A few popes prior to this, the papacy was seated in Naples.) 

In 1309 Avignon was a small village on the Rhone river. When the first Catholic Pope from France, Clement V, was installed, it was decided that Rome was too dangerous. The finest gothic building in Provence, and the largest gothic structure in Europe, was the Palace of the Popes, constructed between 1334 and 1364, during the brief period from 1309 to 1377 when Avignon was the seat of the papal curia. It was one of the largest and most important buildings in Europe. Construction was begun by Pope Clement V, who was born in Aquitaine, and continued by his successors. The construction of the 10-acre, heavily fortified palace consumed most of the income of the papacy during this period. It served as the residence of two popes  Clement VII and Benedict XIII, before the papacy returned permanently to Rome.

While the outside of the palace looked like a fortress, the inside was lavishly decorated with tapestries, sculptures, and decorated wooden ceilings. 

At a much later date it was used as a prison. When we visited they were still working on restoration to the original, Papal, configuration, 

getting rid of sections that had been walled up while it was a prison and repairing and restoring damaged areas, including old frescoes. 

The Pope enjoyed fine wine and established vineyards near Avignon. The land immediately became Papal property, hence not taxable. Eventually the French in the area started to get tired of losing good taxable land, so they built a fort across the river to discourage the Pope from crossing and annexing those lands.

In the evening of the second day we were in Avignon, they had the last of the light shows of the season at the Palace du Papes, so we were able to walk the couple of blocks from our hotel to the plaza in front of the Palace and enjoy the palace lit with pink lights and watch the crowds of young people waiting to get inside for the light show. The music inside was going and too loud for us even standing quite a distance away from the palace. Guess we are old folks alright.

We really enjoyed Avignon. It had a relaxed pace, some great places to eat and people watch, nice shops and old streets and buildings, but it felt more comfortable than touristy. Our hotel, Hotel de l'Horloge, was excellent, comfortable, spacious, had an elevator, served a generous buffet breakfast as part of our reasonable lodging fee,

had a quiet and comfy lounge on each floor in case you wanted to just sit and relax but not in your room,

had a very helpful reception staff and was just steps from the main plaza.

The first evening we took the recommendation of one of the front desk staff and ate at a nice restaurant on the way to the plaza by the Palace du Papes. The food was excellent. Sweetie had some wonderful escargot. I had forgotten to bring my bookmark explaining my dairy allergy, so I ended up not eating my salad since we couldn't find out if the dressing had dairy.

The tables had wonderful artwork under the glass. Ours looked like a Moulin Rouge knockoff.

It had been a long day, what with the drive from St. Saturnin-les-Apt with all the roundabouts, finding our way to the hotel, getting settled in and exploring the town, and then having a late dinner. More in the next post!

Bridges

The last two days have been relaxed, with a visit to Pont du Garde yesterday and a close look at the Avignon bridge, St. Benedict's Bridge (I think), the one in the nursery rhyme.

The experience at Pont du Garde was a bridge of sorts, too. Their excellent museum really communicated the Roman experience of creating the aquaduct that carried water for 300 years from the mountains all the way to Nimes. It was a marvel of Roman engineering. The bridge is taller than the Statue of Liberty, long enough to match three modern jetliners parked nose to tail. It has three graceful sets of arches and the museum exhibits showed what went in to making those successive arches.  By the time that we walked to the bridge, it was raining, but since neither Sweetie nor I melt, we were fine. If you look you can see the umbrellas of other visitors. Look for the umbrellas on high, found during our walk through the old town of Avignon later.

Not to be forgotten is our lunch that day. We still are not used to French business times. Shopping is done in the early morning and after 4 or 4:30 pm until about 7 (at least in Provence) and lunch is from noon to 2 pm. We left the Pont du Garde site about 2:30, forgetting to eat, so turned off at a grocery store only to find it closed since it wasn't shopping time. The only place we could find still open for eating was a McDonald's! I hadn't eaten at McDonald's in the States for something like 20 years. But I was grateful that they were open, that they had touch screens so we didn't have to order in fractured French, and the McNuggets tasted about the same, as did the frites (fries). Here is a near by building set showing the juxtaposition of old and new.

Today we walked around Avignon's old section

and had a picnic lunch in the gardens by the Palais du Pape. Plums, local cheese, pate and baguette...very French.

It was sunny but quite windy at the top of the garden where we could see all the way from the Luberon mountains where we were last week to the Rhone river and ramparts nearby.

Avignon

Yes, there is a bridge, an old one (although it is only partial and hasn't been used for a long time as an actual bridge...they build a modern one). The Rhone River runs under it, right next to the walled city of Avignon. Prior to 1309 it was a tiny town, but then the Catholic Church had their first French Pope. He didn't think that Rome was safe enough, so he moved the whole organization to Avignon and turned it into a real town! For almost 100 years the Popes lived here and all the administration of the Church took place from here. That required the building of a massive fort/palace for protection and to house all the workers. It took decades with 400-500 men working all the time to create the Palais du Papes, or papal palace.

The papal palace is enormous, stately and sort of brooding. It was eventually used for a state prison sometime after the Pope left and returned to Rome at the insistence of the Romans. In the early 20th century they started to reconstruct the building, and that work is still going on as you can see if you look at the large arch in the photo below.

As you can imagine after centuries of neglect, some of the frescoes are damaged, but even fragmented or faded, they are still beautiful.

Inside the Palais there were numerous gargoyles. I spotted this fellow and he reminded me a lot of a similar creature hiding under the Fremont bridge near Seattle. What do you think?

We are staying a very short walk away from the Palais and can see the bell tower from our room in the hotel in the old section.

We hear the bells peal every hour. Since the same happened at our last place, I'm thinking this is the trip of the bells.

The plaza in front of the Palais du Papes has lovely cafes and one of the days we were there an amazing musician was playing jazz. One of the days we were here we walked up to the gardens just to the right of the building behind the cafe in the photo below and had a picnic. We were pretty fortunate with the weather. It only got cloudy the morning that we left town.