Wandering the Rhone, Part II

The next morning we resumed our journey.  The Rhône widens at Lyon and assumes an even more industrial and commercial aspect, laden with long freight barges.  This isn’t surprising – for millennia it has been a highway between the Mediterranean world and the heart of what is now France.  As far as possible we stayed close to the river, but our way was often blocked by industrial plants like oil refineries.  As with the Mississippi in the United States, the banks were reinforced by large levees that it was hard to see over.

When we reached the city of Vienne, there occurred one of those serendipities that make travel worthwhile.  A wrong exit off the motorway put us on a road running along the eastern bank of the river.  Not really knowing where we were, we took the first right, which put us on a bridge over the Rhône.  To our right on the western bank stood a large modernist building surrounded by open fields, which I suddenly realized – I was acting as co-pilot and had been responsible for the wrong turning – that the fields looked unmistakably like archaeological ruins.

We hadn’t realized that Vienne has a sister museum to the one in Lyon, with even more extensive exhibits and Roman ruins.  As soon as we managed to turn around and find a parking place we knew that our plans for the day would have to be revised – we had a good morning’s work ahead of us.

Model of Roman Vienne

The museum at Saint-Romain-en-Gal, located across the river from the town of Vienne, is a state-of-the-art establishment, with excellent explanatory displays that take full advantage of a treasure trove of artifacts uncovered in the area, many through recent excavations on the site.  It seems that this was an even larger Roman city than Lyon, a major port and administrative center.   

Because the lands on the western bank had not been developed in later years it was possible to excavate a large section of the former Roman city, including storehouses, shops and extensive villas owned by wealthy merchants.  Many of the exquisite mosaics that had decorated their rooms were recovered and displayed, as well as some amazing wall paintings.

After exhausting the museum we walked the ruins themselves and attempted to imagine what life in those villas – with their open court-yards, shady arbors and reflecting pools – might have been like.   

And then we returned to the museum building for a pleasant lunch at a restaurant overlooking the river.

Afterward we explored Vienne proper, which had some impressive Roman buildings intermingled with later developments, including a church with a nice Romanesque cloister.  An impressive temple dedicated to Augustus and his wife Livia stood opposite a line of busy shops; farther up the hill there was another amphitheater.  We were beginning to agree with the opinion that France has more and better Roman ruins than Italy itself.

 Having spent the better part of the day in Vienne, we hastened to our next destination.  Leaving the Rhône, we drove southeast to the Côtes du Rhône region where we planned to spend some time getting reacquainted with our favorite wines.   During our last visit to Provence several years ago, we happened to drive by the Hôtel Les Florets, an attractive country hotel in the foothills of the Dentelles de Montmirail above the village of Gigondas.  We had reserved a table on the terrace overlooking vine-covered hillsides and had one of the most memorable dinners of our lives.  So, while planning our Rhône adventure we were determined to return and stay there.

We were not disappointed.  Even though the weather was a bit rainy and cool, the hotel was a perfect place to reconnect with the Provençal countryside that we love, with its dry pine-covered hills that always remind me of southern California.   The hotel’s terrace with its stunning views was the perfect place for a pre-dinner aperitif, even if it was too cool to eat outside.  The food was every bit as good as we’d remembered, and we enjoyed the chance to explore further its extensive wine list.  We picked the brains of the sommelier, who happened to be the innkeeper who had checked us in and who we met again the next day cleaning the swimming pool.  Foremost among our discoveries was how much we enjoyed the Muscat grown in nearby Beaumes-de-Venise, even though we’d never liked sweet wines before.

The next day was Sunday, and because of our experience with Switzerland’s strict Sunday closing laws we were afraid we would miss the chance to visit the local wine cellars.  Hence we were pleased to find that all the shops in Gigondas would open for business after lunch.  After a walk through the hilltop village we had a tasting-menu lunch (a series of small tapas-style bites paired with different wines) and visited a number of caveaus to partake of free samples of their wares.  We came away with quite a nice collection for our cellar.

On Monday we were back on the road, returning to the Rhône after a swing through Beaumes-de-Venise to pick up some of the afore-mentioned Muscat.  We passed by the city of Avignon, site of the Papal palace for much of the 14^th century, but didn’t stop because we’d visited before in long-ago graduate student days.  Once more we diverged from the river to head toward the town of St. Rémy-de-Provence where another major Roman site awaited us. 

Hard on the heels of our tours of Lyon and Vienne, our visit to the ruins of the city of Glanum firmly cemented our understanding of the sweep and power of the Roman world in this part of France.  Glanum was founded in the 6^th century BC by a Celto-Ligurian tribe on the site of a healing spring in the foothills of the Alpilles; beside the spring was a shrine to the Celtic god Glanis.  Trade with the Greek colony of Marseilles about 90 kilometers to the south brought Hellenistic influences that can be seen in remains of houses, shops and shrines.  In the 1^st century BC the Romans attacked and leveled these and gradually reconstructed the city in their image.   

They erected a massive triumphal arch at the entrance to the city near the end of the reign of Augustus – it clearly promotes acculturation to the Roman way by contrasting Celts in chains with free men in Roman garb.  Nearby is a monumental mausoleum to the Julii family.  Within the city itself the Romans constructed ever-larger buildings – a forum, baths, temples – atop the ruins of the previous buildings. 

In turn, however, the city was overrun by the Alamanni in 260 AD and subsequently abandoned.  Over the centuries its buildings were dismantled to provide stones for a new village on the plain that became St. Rémy.  Only the monuments on the edge of the city survived; known as “Les Antiques” they became a must-see for travelers on the Grand Tour.  In the 1920s, sustained archaeological excavations began to decipher the layers of previous civilizations.

Today the ruins stand in a large sun-baked park flanked on one side by an olive grove and on the other by the rocky outcroppings of the Alpilles.  It was hot but fascinating work to move back and forth between the Celtic, Hellenic and Roman layers.  Surrounded by the dry crags of the hills the area seemed to exist in a dimension beyond time.

Yet once we had finished there was little time left to visit the other attraction standing on the other side of the olive grove – the Monastery of St. Paul-de-Mausole, with its attached mental hospital where Vincent van Gogh resided for a year near the end of his life.  The site draws many visitors eager to view the room where he ostensibly lived, but it is a reconstruction.  We were actually more interested in visiting the Monastery’s Romanesque church and cloister.  But as we left the sight of olive trees in late-afternoon light reminded us of the source of some of van Gogh’s work during his stay.

Our hotel afforded a wonderful view of the Alpilles and we enjoyed exploring the old town with its maze of narrow streets encircled by a broad café-lined boulevard.  During our two nights there we had pleasant dinners but enjoyed most the time spent sitting at a café under the stars.

But we still had yet to complete our mission to follow the Rhône to its end.  On our last day before returning home we drove through the Alpilles, past the impressive cliff-top castle ruins of Les Baux, to rejoin the Rhône at Arles.  As it nears the Mediterranean, the river divides into two branches (the large and small), the land in between a large marshy delta called the Camargue.  Parts of the wetlands have been turned into rice fields, and there are vast evaporation beds from which sea salt is extracted.  But much of the area is a protected Nature Park where wildlife flourishes, from flamingos and wild boars to white horses.

We stayed with the Grand Rhône on the eastern edge of the Camargue, intent on finding the point where it entered the sea.   

But we began to realize that this wasn’t going to be so easily done, because our road diverged to the west and ended at a broad beach a couple of miles from the river.  Having been assured by a guide at a local nature area that we could walk to the river from there, we parked the car and set out eastward on foot.

The Mediterranean was as blue as I remembered but a strong wind was blowing from the west and few others had ventured out.  We passed a ghost city of campers that seemed permanently installed on the beach, waiting for the weekend or summer vacation for their owners to return.

After we had walked along the beach for about a mile, we encountered another challenge to our mission, in the form of a large warning sign:

Nudist Beach: Here one lives nude

It seems that the rest of the area was reserved for nudists.  Alarmed, we debated the wisdom of continuing.  But, seeing that there were few people around we decided to venture forth, keeping our eyes averted when necessary.   

It turned out that there were only a few nudists intrepid enough to swim on such a blustery day.  Eventually we finally reached the end of the camping city.  Climbing some large sand dunes we were able to survey the last marshy expanse of the river before it disappeared into the sea.

Feeling satisfied that we had done what we set out to do, we returned to St. Rémy for the night and drove back to Switzerland the next day.  Because I was feeling homesick for the mountains we headed northwest into the French Alps.  We lunched in the charming city of Gap and passed through Grenoble on our way home.

I’m not sure I can say that we learned a particular lesson in tracing the Rhône from its origin in an Alpine glacier to its end.  But in the process we gained further appreciation for the many-layered history of the region – and a nice little collection of Côtes du Rhône wine.