Avignon Old Town (Part 2)

Following on from a couple of days ago, a selection of some of the notable 18th and 19th century buildings in the old town. We begin with the Hotel de Ville and l'Opera (misleadingly renamed the Theatre; although opera en Francais does not have quite the same meaning as in English, "theatre" is not really a synonym); move on to what is now the Galerie Ducastel but was originally the Theatre Comedie, founded in 1660 and taking its present form in 1825, home to the opera bouffant tradition for many years; and then drop by two eighteenth century mansions which have been converted into museums -- the Musee Vouland, which houses a display of pre-revolutionary furniture and asociated objets collected by the 1920s industrialist Louis Vouland; and (in the very magnificent former Hotel de Villeneuve-Martignan) the Musee Calvet, based on but expanded from the collection of the 18th century's Dr Esprit Calvet: an engaging collection of paintings and portraits from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, which includes a number of singletons from famous Northern European artists such as Brueghel and Vlaminck as well as many pieces from less well-known French artists such as Nicolas Mignard, Horace Vernet and Jean Louis David plus any number of Provencal artists whose local fame did not survive their demise. But such is the way with art of all kinds....

Avignon Old Town (Part 1)

After a longer delay than I'd anticipated, I return with some photographs of Rue des Teinturiers, supposedly the most atmospheric street in the old town. It would also have been, at one time, the smelliest, for it was a street lined with workshops occupied by cloth dyers and fullers, who used the power provided by the water wheels to drive the wooden hammers that threshed the wool and cotton....and then tipped their waste dyes and other gunk back into the same small channel. At least the water flowed away from the centre of town, so that the smelliest smells were concentrated by the medieval walls, from where our walk along the street started. (Whether anyone would have wanted to buy cloth which they knew had been dyed and fulled in the workshops closest to the walls is left as an exercise for the reader.) The modern street is enlivened by sculpted blocks depicting a variety of scenes: animals, memento mori, whatever. Their exact function is a mystery, but then who said art had to be functional?

For those fascinated by the circumstances in which photographs are taken, these images were collected during a torrential downpour -- rain which had held off during the whole of our time in Provence but then arrived all at once on our final afternoon. We spent almost as much time standing in doorways waiting for the rain to pass as we did walking along the street.

Yet More Photographs

As promised yesterday, some views from the roof of the Palais des Papes, over Place des Papes. The first view is a general view southwest towards the River Rhone, just visible towards the top right of the picture; at the bottom right of the picture can be seen part of the exuberantly decorated facade of the seventeenth century Hotel des Monnaies, formerly the papal mint and now the music conservatory: it is seen to better advantage in the second picture. The third picture shows the view north, towards the Petit Palais, formerly part of the papal complex but now a museum of religious art, mostly of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the building is seen to better advantage in the fourth picture. The River Rhone appears again on the left of the third picture; if you look carefully, the Pont de Benezet can be seen to the left of the Petit Palais.

Next time: selected buildings in Avignon's old town.