Day 101. Arles. Nov 15. 2001

For a day in which we woke, still tired, for a day in we passed by the Roman amphitheater with a dismissive wave because our minds were too numb to care, we have seen more than I ever thought possible.

Arles woke us with a grey coldness and the typical hostel breakfast. After days of inadequate sleep we were eager to return to beds. But despite purchasing another nights rest we were evicted during the 10-5 closing period. We set out to explore Arles, the Roman city of Arelate, with drooping eyelids.

We climbed the main streets back to the centre of town, to the town hall and the church of La Cathedrale Saint Trophime with its adjoining cloister. The cathedral's great gates are an ornate masterwork, smooth stone statues in a gentle curvature, with mythical beasts over the lintels. the inside of the church does not equal the exterior but it is a nice place to sit and rest. There is a large collection of relics, a grisly display of spiritual wealth. The bones of St. Roch, St. Etienne and many others all in gilded casks. Many have small holes in which the faithful can insert a finger and touch a bit of holiness.

The cloister next door looked intriguing, but we weren’t really interested in paying. We climbed the streets towards the arena, past the amphitheater where again we are not too interested in paying. Our minds are too numb to appreciate beauty or history. We circled the arena but did not go in. We wander aimlessly and wait for the hostel to open again so that we can go back to our beds. And then we stumble on the Cryptoportiques.

Unsure of what they are we enter the building with the sign, an ancient abandoned church with only the altar remaining. The sanctuary is deserted, only a staircase leading down and a small booth to pay. We buy the pass to the city and embark on an adventure. We descend the staircase, down, down below the level of the streets, beneath homes and sewers and layers of rock. We emerge from the staircase in a dark, damp and musty tunnel, twenty feet below ground. Rows of arches split the tunnel in two and at the junction of the stairs it turns a sharp right angle to disappear into the darkness.

Arles is on a hill. When the Romans made it a colony after it aided Julius Caesar against Pompey, it required a forum. The Romans leveled out the land around the hill by building a massive basement, where we now stood. The cave was eerily silent and the light, only provided by slits to the forum above, was a pale yellow light that illuminated nothing. We followed the tunnels beneath houses and hotels, an enormous artificial cavern of darkness.

The far side had once opened on to the side of the hill, to the backs of roman shops that catered to Roman material needs and the great basement had served as a subterranean highway for goods and horses that weren’t wanted in the city streets. The caverns were bare and damp smelled of age. They spoke of ancient confidence and ability to build whatever was required. The Romans never fail to impress.

But beneath the deepest basement of the Hotel De Ville our imaginations began to run away with our minds. Heather remembered the Balrog the Dwarves unearthed when they delved too deep beneath the earth, while lovecraftian horrors from the Mountains of Madness nagged at the back of my mind. We left quickly.

But, whether by the excitement of exploring or the desire to get our money’s worth from our tickets, we had a renewed vigor. We returned to the cloister of St. Trophime. From deep beneath Arles we climbed to a garden secluded above the city. The cloister was beautiful, and secreted away from the wind, very warm. The carvings were smooth and full of energy and the stone seats were inviting but if we had not bought the tick for the whole package it would have been an entrance we regretted.

From the cloister we returned to the arena. The arena belonged to the cats of Arles and they basked against ancient stone seats as the wind raged outside of the ancient arched walls. Gently curving corridors circled the building and we followed them around in wide circles. Two dogs roamed the upper stories and we passed them many times in our rounds. They seemed lost and unable to find their way back to the ground but they seemed to enjoy their explorations even as they lost themselves deeper into the arena.

We climbed to the rooftops where three strange, very non-roman towers loomed. The exposed tops of the Roman arches rolled away from us in an endless series of stone waves. We entered the towers and looked down on the city below us. Hotels and apartments, crammed together, made red islands of roof tiles beneath us.

When the Empire collapsed those living in the ruins were faced by with the loss of technologies and the waves of invasions. They had a unique solution. Not trusting their ability to fortifications and not having enough money or manpower to build them anyway. They retreated to the structures the Romans left behind. The arena became the new city. Protective towers were erected. The arches were divided into apartments and a city was erected on the arena floor. Even now the windows and the doors of the middle ages could still be seen. How far the world fell. The arena city speaks of a terror and a loss so complete it is hard to imagine.

We left the arena and followed the streets back to the medieval gate at the entrance to the city. We passed the intersection where Vincent Van GoghMaison Jaune.” Paved over now by a new roundabout.

The quay over the Rhones edge, where the Romans has once raised a bridge of boats and Van Gogh’s fevered vision has wandered, was a filthy mess with bricks crumbling and moss covering all. The baths of Constantine were not much better, obviously not a priority for the town. We picked our way among the rubble with hesitant footsteps. The walls seemed to decay around us.

From the baths we returned to the Amphitheater in the shadow of the arena. Little was left of an amphitheater that could at one time hold 10 000. The walls were gone, the upper levels, the stages settings that had risen 3 stores above the town in a series of columns and statutes that must have been amazing. All that was left were two pillars and a piles of intricately carved and absolutely beautiful rubble. Here school children scrambled over the ruins and hid in secret niches for a forbidden cigarette far from the prying eyes of the teachers.

I wondered what plays had unfolded on the long vanished stage. Oedipus? Antigone? The Medea? Amateur performances of poetry and local auteurs that had failed and were lost to history? Flocks of pigeons blocked the sun and wind howled where once a chorus had sung. No deus ex machine had saved this theater from the ravages of time. We left feeling the weight of years.

We walked out of the city in a long walk to the ugly buildings of the Museum of Antiquity. Blue panels on a concrete triangle that seemed the epitome of bad architecture. Falling away in the gray starkness of a concrete pit were the remains of the Roman circus, the curving apex of the racetrack. The rest disappeared beneath roads and marshland.




The inside of the museum was a completely different story than the outside. Here we found one of the richest and most complete museums of antiquity we had yet seen. The towering, heavily muscled statue of Augustus from the the destroyed amphitheater at the apex, the museum fell away in the smooth geometric lines of a triangle. You begin in the prehistoric period but rapidly move into Arelate, Roman Arles. There are beautiful carven marble heads, Augustus, Tiberius, Hadrian, Caius and Lucius Caesar. There is a great augustan shield of marble and the intricate relief carvings of sarcophagi.


But it is the stories of everyday life that most fascinate. Lead pipes by the dozen, keys to locks crumbled to rust, most fairly conventional but many on rings in a style I have begun to associate with the grandeur of Rome. Objects for primping and preening that have not changed in 2000 years of history, especially tweezers. There are mock ups of the major areas of town, forum, circus, arena, which help visualize the scale of the structures on which we stood. And there was the most impressive collection of mosaics yet. Europa abducted by Zeus, an homage to Triton, the allegory of the seasons in small bits of colored tile. Most are damaged but some are impressively intact. Telling stories to the descendants of the descendants of those who sacked Rome. There is so much to see. The few preserved remains of the 28 000 wooden pilings that form the base of the circus, the shattered head of a marble child.

One exhibit that caught my eye is the remains from the hydraulic mill of Barbegal, a flour mill that ran down a hillside and was powered by twenty waterwheels. With one structure enough grinding was done in one mill to feed the entire population of Arles.

Arles sat on a crossroads of trade, the Via Domitia, the Via Agrippa and Aurelian Way all pass through the city. The Rhone with it’s cargoes of rich wines bathes the banks, the camargue plains region teems with sheep and bulls. The legacy of ruins and structures and a pervading sense of history that Romans left Arles is a powerful one indeed.

When we finally left the museum and headed back towards our humble lodgings for the night we were more tired than I thought possible. But still we have found time to follow the small yellow tiles inset in the concrete to the sanitarium of Arles where Van Gogh spent some of his time. The Garden, sheltered from the wind and rain in the courtyard of the hospital, was untouched by the ravages of weather and was beautiful in the depths of November. The hospital was clean and crisp and exuded a sense of health. But whet, I wonder would Van Gogh make of the shops that had replaced the wards, ship-owners the doctors and tourists the sick? 

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