Provence Redux

When I was in France as a young woman of 22, there was a popular song which contained the words “Paris n’est pas la France” (Paris isn’t France). The idea was that if you go to Paris, and think you have visited France, you have not had the entire experience. Building on that concept, I can say “Avignon n’est pas Provence.”

Traveling to Avignon is something many tourists do, as the city is one of the main historical and tourist sites of Provence. The university program of which my daughter was a part organized a field trip for the kids, which took them to Avignon. However, they never made it past the most widely publicized sites into what I would consider the Real Provence.

By Real Provence, I mean the part that is off the beaten track – the Provence of small villages surrounded by vineyards and olive groves. When you are in a large city like Nice, Avignon, or Marseille, where the residents are accustomed to dealing with high volumes of tourists, and especially if you are an Anglophone who is attempting to speak French, the inhabitants tend to respond to you in English, both as a courtesy and as a time-saving device. In the back roads and villages of Provence, the conversation, however, continues en français.

The Provençal territory the closest to my heart is that bit of land around my dear village of Le Barroux – the landscape dominated by le Mont Ventoux or les Dentelles de Montmiraille. This is the area that Sarah and I visited the day after our stay in Le Barroux.

We rose early in the morning, and after breakfast at Les Géraniums, headed toward Vaison-la-Romaine. Vaison has two parts, a lower city, on one side of the Ouvèze River which consists of excavated Roman ruins; and an upper city, which consists in large part of a preserved Medieval upper town.

Our visit concentrated on the Roman ruins. These included part of a preserved aqueduct; house foundations, a statue of Tiberius, and some wonderfully preserved mosaics.

We left Vaison, and headed for a couple of local villages known for their fine wines. The first was Gigondas. Before sampling their wines, we climbed to the top of the town, where there was a stairway ascending to a lovely 14th century church. Along the way was a collection of local sculpture. At the top, we asked (in French) a woman if she would take a picture of the two of us, with the valley in the background. She responded by asking if we would please just speak English, because she was Swedish, and spoke not a word of French (quelle surprise!) From the area in front of the church, we could see les Dentelles de Montmiraille.

After talking to a lady in the main part of the village, and selecting a couple of bottles of the local vintage, we then went to Beaumes de Venise. During my own stay in Le Barroux, the local wine cooperative was located in Beaumes. Sarah and I arrived in this lovely village at about lunch time, and decided to eat at the café in the middle of town. We ordered the house rosé, which was wonderful. Our objective in this village was to purchase some bottles of Muscat de Beaumes de Venise, which is a desert wine I recalled as being synonymous with "nectar of the gods". Our waiter suggested that we go to a wine shop across the main plaza in town, which would open after the lunch-time siesta, and was run, he said, by “un vieillard très sympathique” or a very nice old man.

Having a little time to kill, we first found a public toilet. This was a common sort of public facility which, after each use would automatically seal itself and hose its own interior down with a combination of water and disinfectant. From a public health standpoint, this was commendable, but from a practical standpoint a bit disconcerting, since it left the floor and the commode wet and a little slippery. Having taken care of The Necessary, we then wandered about the local streets admiring the beauty of the village.

At about 2:00, we ventured back to the wine shop, to find the vieillard in residence. He was indeed a very nice gentleman, who was curious about Sarah and her studies in Nice, as well as my own history with Provence. After a chat with him, we completed our purchases, and reluctantly started on our way back to Nice.