To the south, in search of sunshine
Back after a winter hiatus... sunshine trip to Marseille and Aix-en-Provence, gallery exploring in Paris, seasonal produce, and a building imitating a croissant
It has been a while! Nice to ‘see’ you, if you are still around reading :) Hoping you are doing well. Somehow the combination of wintertime blues, long days of work, and short hours of daylight zapped all extra energy to periodically step back and summarize some of the weeks’ happenings … but trying to get back into the habit now!
The days are getting longer again, and the sun has been showing her face more and more. The other week I was happily surprised to see the return of the toy sailboats (voiliers) on the pond in the Luxembourg Gardens, which seemed like an early harbinger of spring.
Since these posts paused for a few months, I thought I’d recap a January trip to Marseille for — you guessed it — a bit of sunshine. A friend and I saw a flash sale on the SNCF (French national railway) website and booked a weekend trip to the south faster than you can say TGV. These high-speed trains take you from the center of Paris to the center of Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast, in 3 hours, plus or minus a few minutes. While it was still a bit chilly (around 12 C), the sun was shining bright and sparkling on the water, and being further south makes you feel a bit more of a warm glow when wrapped up in the sunlight.
Founded around 600 BCE by Greek settlers, Marseille is the oldest city in France, and today, it is the second most populous city in the country with around 900,000 inhabitants. Marseille has profited from its maritime location as a trading port since ancient times. These days, Marseille’s perhaps most famous export is its soap, whose manufacture began more than 600 years ago (naturally, a few round Marseille soaps ended up in our backpacks on the return to Paris).
The ancient Greeks had a rather particular name for the city, Massalia, coming from mass, or lump, with the ‘lump’ being the hill you see in the distance. Striking hill with sweeping views over the city and the ocean … lump of Earth… same difference. Since the 19th century, this lump is topped by the Basilica of Our Lady of the Guard, or Bonne-mère (The good Mother), a neo-Romanesque-Byzantine church that has become the symbol of the city.
Elsewhere in Marseille, there were plenty of other incredible vistas to be had, with the biting winds not pictured…
At sunset we walked down towards to the ‘Bay of false money’ (L'anse de la Fausse Monnaie), which I reckon refers to the sunset, glittering in the water like golden coins? What do you think?
There were so many beautiful narrow streets to explore, like this one in the Panier neighborhood.
That Sunday, we took a day trip to Aix-en-Provence, or simply Aix, an approximately 40-minute and couple-euro local train ride away from Marseille. (I will never stop appreciating the train networks!)
From the center of town, fueled by a delicious regional lunch at a one-man restaurant called Yves (probably this one man single-handedly running the place is called Yves?!) and further energized by calissons (a typical regional candy made with ground almonds and candied melons, which taste like a fruitier version of marzipan), we walked to a viewpoint of one of the most famous mountains — at least in art history — the Mont Sainte-Victoire, made famous by Cézanne’s series of paintings of this mountain between 1904-1906.
And here is one one of Cézanne’s depictions, which I and many others have admired at the Musée d’Orsay…
The next week, back in grey Paris, sometimes the only way to find some sun and color was to go see the sun rise over the Seine. One morning I indulged in a criminally expensive flat white (6,5 euros…), which was, however, delicious and made for a lovely early morning together with the sunrise bike ride.
A breakfast that is, however, free — even if only a feast for the eyes — is this building in the 5th arrondissement that I can never not smile when passing by. Is it just me, or does it look strikingly similar to the layers of a deliciously golden, flakey croissant? I further have to smirk when reading the names of the streets at this corner, Sarrazin and Hautefille: sarrasin, with a ‘s’ not a ‘z’, means buckwheat, so almost croissant-like ingredients, and Hautefeuille makes me think of ‘mille feuilles’ (thousand sheets), which is a different dessert but also fits quite well to the many layers of thin puff pastry rolled up in a croissant … or I am the only one? Probably I should be paying attention to the cars, buses, and other bikes whizzing around me while cycling past this building, instead of letting my mind drift to croissants … but here we are.
Anyway …. on a different note, I am always grateful when my friend working in the art world takes me along for an adventure of exploring galleries around Paris. Most galleries let you bring along your dog, so you can make sure your dog is the most cultured in all of Paris…
A highlight was a Jeanne Vicerial show at the Galerie Templon (https://www.templon.com/new/exhibition.php?la=en&show_id=715&display_work=1). The artist is only a few years older than us, born in 1991, and she creates textile sculptures, sometimes with robotic elements.
Another highlight was these works by Hicham Berrada at the Mennour gallery (https://www.hichamberrada.com/portfolio/cartes-meres/) For scale, his Cartes Mères works are only a bit larger than a piece of paper and mounted on the wall like small aquariums or terrariums. Here is a close-up.
To create these works, the artist uses metals from electronic circuits, which he then places into electrolytic baths to create small mineral landscapes, which are fixed in time over the course of a few hours using a resin …. please don’t ask me to really explain what this technical description actually means, but it certainly sounds, and looks incredibly cool.
Less cerebrally, I cannot express how excited I was when one of my favorite stores in Paris, Les Saisonniers (no, not for clothing, or perfume, or wine, or anything else typically Parisian, but for vegetables), opened a store around the corner from me, on the rue Saint-Placide. Positively giddy would be the right description, as their produce — all seasonal, and from within an about 150 km radius from Paris — is incredibly flavorful, and I used to bike 20 minutes or more each way to go to their stores, but then never managed to go very often. Now it is my go-to place to buy fruits and vegetables and coaxes me towards eating locally and seasonally as much as possible.
During the last weeks, a favorite meal was when a friend who grew up in Nice invited us over to his place for dinner and prepared ratatouille and socca, both regional specialities. Socca is relatively easy to make yourself, with the base being chickpea flour, and the combination of crisp, hot, olive-oil soaked socca and ratatouille suffused with herbs of Provence transports you to the south with every bite…
Now I’m just returning from a two-week work trip to Hamburg and hoping for more spring-like days here in Paris.
See you soon,
Anna Lea
I loved the Sarrasin-Millefeuille-Croissant analogy !
Cheers Anna Lea :)
Great update, I really enjoy reading this! It took me a few moments to figure out the orientation of the bottom right picture by the sunrises, but now I got it :) Also, I love Hicham Berrada‘s work with the smoke, it‘s very calming to look at. And the croissant building is awesome, I definitely want to see it the next time I’m in Paris! Now I hope spring comes soon, in Berlin we’re having 15° and sunshine this week :)