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.