France, Arles – Romans and Post-Impressionists

As it turned out, quite by chance we had parked in a very convenient spot indeed and it was only a couple of hundred metres to the very centre of the ancient Roman city. We walked up some steps through a public park and immediately before us we could see the Roman amphitheatre and as there was a nice café with a terrace next to it with a good view we stopped for a while and sat in the sun and had a drink.

We had chosen to visit Arles for two main reasons, its Roman heritage and the painter Vincent Van Gogh. The city has a long history, and was of considerable prominence as a principal Roman Province and the Roman and Romanesque Monuments of the city were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1981. The Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles in from 1888 to 1889 and produced over three hundred paintings and drawings during his time there – that’s a lot of paintings in only a short time.

This was out fourth Roman Amphitheatre this year after Pula in Croatia in March, Mérida in Spain in April and the Coliseum itself in Rome in June and there is something majestic about them which just fascinates me. No one can be absolutely sure about which was the largest in terms of capacity and it is generally agreed that this was the Coliseum but we can be more certain about physical size and there was a plaque nearby that claimed that this was the twelfth largest in the Roman Empire. Interestingly using this criteria the plaque only listed the Coliseum as second largest but it’s like I have always said size isn’t the most important thing!

It didn’t matter at all that this might only be the twelfth largest because it is certainly one of the best looking and the works that have been taking place for over one hundred years or so have made an excellent job of the restoration. In that time the city has torn down houses that had been built inside the arena and demolished structures that had been built around and joined on to its perimeter and the gleaming white structure now stands in a natural bowl surrounded by tasteful up-market cafés and bars and tourist shops.

After we had walked around the outside and felt the imposing presence of the towering walls we paid our admission and went inside into the arena which is in use again today and stages concerts and bull fighting. Provençal-style bullfights are conducted in the amphitheatre in which the bull is not killed but rather a team of brave or foolish men who attempt to remove a rosette from the bull’s horn without getting injured. In addition to this every Easter and on the first weekend of September Arles also holds Spanish-style bull fights and has reckless bull running in the streets.

We stayed awhile in the amphitheatre but there was more to see in Arles so after we left we wandered through the streets and down to the banks of the River Rhône, the second longest river in France after the Loire, and walked along the embankment where river cruisers were beginning to welcome guests on board for a journey north to Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Because of the river, Arles remained economically important for many years after the Romans left as a major port but the arrival of the railway in the nineteenth century eventually killed off much of the river trade, leading to the town becoming something of a backwater.

This made it an attractive destination for the painter Vincent van Gogh, who arrived there in February 1888. He was fascinated by the Provençal landscapes and many of his most famous paintings were completed there including The Night Cafe, the Yellow Room, Starry Night Over the Rhone, and L’Arlésienne. I like Van Gogh paintings and the tourist shops were full of prints and reproductions but I am not an art critic and have to confess that alongside those I find brilliant I find some that quite frankly are not so good (shock, horror). The sort of things that my children used to bring home from school, I’d say well done and give them words of patronising encouragement and then after they had gone to bed I’d sellotape it up inside a kitchen cupboard!

As we walked through the narrow streets and into the Place de la Republique, the Hôtel de Ville and the Cathedral I liked to imagine that we were walking in the footsteps of Vincent but the truth of course is, that like Mozart and Salzburg or Shakespeare and Southwalk, it is unlikely that, a hundred years later he would recognise very much about the place at all bearing in mind all of the restorations to the Roman antiquities and especially the fact that Allied bombing raids in 1944 destroyed the house where he lived, much of the rest of the city and the principal bridge across the river that he would have been familiar with.

Our circuitous walk brought us back to the amphitheatre and the Roman theatre which has also been extensively restored and after in the last two thousand years being a fortress, a Visigoth housing development and later a landfill site is now restored to its original intended purpose. We walked around the grounds and through the ancient relics that littered the gardens and then before we said goodbye to Arles we had a second drink in the café near the arena where Kim persuaded me not to drive to Nîmes and another amphitheatre but to take the coast road back across the Camargue instead. And here was me mistakenly thinking she likes Roman amphitheatres as much as I do!

Istria 2011, The Roman Amphitheatre at Pula

The airport is only about eight kilometres outside of the city so once we had completed the hire car formalities and had squeezed ourselves and our luggage into the silver Hyundai Getz (not the Skoda Fabia that we had ordered) we set off towards Pula where we arrived just a few minutes later and found a convenient car park directly below the Roman amphitheatre and close to the busy docks.

The first century amphitheatre is the most important and most impressive building in Pula because it is the sixth largest in the world and one of the best preserved examples of its kind. The Coliseum in Rome was the biggest Roman amphitheatre and could seat a massive fifty-thousand spectators (Some estimates suggest eighty thousand but generally about fifty thousand is the agreed capacity of the stadium), the second largest was Capua, also in Italy but now sadly in ruin, which had only a slightly smaller capacity, and the third was in El Djem in Tunisia with a capacity of thirty-five thousand. The amphitheatre in Pula was designed for about twenty-five thousand and there were similar sized stadiums in Verona in Italy and at Nimes and Arles in Southern France so this was more of a Championship rather than a Premiership Ground.

We walked around the external walls and I was immediately struck by the grandeur and magnificence of the building. I have been to Rome and seen the Coliseum and in my opinion nothing can compare with that but this building made that assessment a close run thing. It towered mightily above us, the white stone walls reaching up into the clear blue sky and looking proud and strong.

As it was about lunchtime we decided to postpone the visit to the inside until the afternoon and we walked towards the city centre to look for somewhere to eat. We had stayed in Pula before so we knew where we were going, or at least we thought we did but confused by the busy streets we took a few wrong turns looking for a bar that we had enjoyed before. Down at the waterside the city isn’t particularly interesting or picturesque and we walked along a harbour that was fronted with bleak marine associated offices and was sadly without bars and cafés, but things improved as we walked back from the dockside and into main town street behind and eventually came to the main square with plenty of bars to choose from so we sat on the sunny side of the square and ordered drinks.

This has been Pula’s main square for a long time because in one corner, close to where we were sitting was the two thousand year old Roman Temple of Augustus which was in surprisingly good shape for all its years. It was hot now and the sun was trapped in the square and the heat intesified as it bounced off the white walls and pavements made of dazzling Istrian stone.

Istrian stone was quarried in the hills behind the coast and was much valued by the Romans and later the Venetians who, in the middle ages, controlled the quarries and transported thousands of tonnes to Venice to build the state buildings there. It is a limestone that is so dense that it resembles the finest marble and it was perfect for building columns and monuments because it could be quarried in exceptionally thick strata.

After the short break we left the square and quickly found the Café Orfej still advertising very reasonably priced meals. That appealed to us all so we went inside and made an attempt at translating the menu and finding that we didn’t have much trouble with pizzas we had a fine lunch and a couple of beers.

After lunch we walked back through the sunshine to the amphitheatre, this time to pay our entrance fee of forty Kuna and to go inside the impressive structure. There are over two hundred surviving Roman amphitheatres across what was the Roman Empire and this is one of the best to see because this is the only one that has its entire external structure rising to three levels still intact. There is still a lot missing however as parts of it had been dismantled over the years to provide ready prepared paving for roads and a convenient supply of building materials for later construction projects such as the town’s Venetian fortress built nearby. Thankfully most of the vandalism was restricted to the internal seating and terracing and the external walls with their towering arches are still left in place to see today.

The amphitheatre was built on sloping ground so that the part facing the sea has three levels and the other side facing the land has two. The great plinths which form the base are visible, along with two orders of arches divided by pilasters and an attic of rectangular windows. When it was in use large beams supported awnings which protected the spectators from the sun or the rain. Four towers around the perimeter had cisterns containing perfumed water that could be sprinkled on the crowd because the smell of animals, blood and fear must have been rather distressing even for a blood-thirsty mob. Under the fifteen entrances was a ditch served by elevators for beasts, people and stage sets to be moved easily about.

The amphitheatre was part of the primary gladiator circuit and remained in use until the fifth century and in that time it is impossible to imagine how many men and animals died in this place. Underneath the arena there is a small museum housed in the underground corridors where exotic animals and gladiators waited their turn to be raised to the stadium for their part in the bloody show and one can only try to imagine what a brutal and thoroughly unpleasant place this might once have been.

It was late afternoon now so having completed our tour of the amphitheatre and the underground museum we agreed that it was time to leave and drive to our hotel which was in the nearby fishing village of Fažana.

Spain 2011, Mérida, World Heritage Site (1)

After sleeping well we were looking forward to a five star start to the day, but I have to say that we were generally disappointed by the breakfast which was served in a dimly lit room with no staff and although there was plenty of choice the whole experience lacked any sort of vitality or atmosphere. Never mind because we weren’t here for the breakfasts we were here to see the city’s famous Roman ruins, which are some of the best preserved in Europe.

For a couple of weeks I had been suffering from a sore Achilles heel and it was especially bad this morning and that was a bit of a nuisance because there was going to be a lot of walking involved and there was a much see because Extremadura is considered to be the traditional boundary between Moorish and Christian Spain and Mérida itself has previously passed between Christian, Moorish, and even Portuguese control. Because of its rich and varied history it was declared a UNESCO World heritage site in 1993.

First of all we walked along a busy main road towards the crimson and saffron Plaza de Torres and near here was our first excavation to visit. We bought an all sites pass for €12 each which seemed like a good deal and went inside to see the remains of a house that had been the home and office of an important Roman citizen in the first century A.D. and after that we visited an adjacent ancient Roman burial site and cemetery.

It was getting hot as we made our way to one of the main attractions, the amphitheatre and theatre and as we walked we were aware of hundreds of school children arriving in buses, far too many for this to be a normal school trip occasion and we wondered what they were all doing here. We found the entrance to the site and all was revealed because today, and all week, there was a production of the Greco-Latin Youth Festival Theatre which meant that the theatre was in use and access was restricted. I was annoyed about that and wondered just how restricted?

We went first to the amphitheatre which was completed in 8 B.C. and was able to seat up to fifteen thousand spectators within the elliptical stadium. Last month we had visited the amphitheatre at Pula which accommodated twenty-thousand spectators but this seemed just as huge. It wasn’t in such good shape however because a lot of it has been subsequently dismantled for alternative building projects.

Mérida was the capital city of the most westerly Roman Province of Lusitania so this was an important place and the amphitheatre here would have been on the main gladiatorial and events circuit of the Empire and it continued to be used for this purpose until the fourth century. Today, on account of its past, Mérida is a sister city of Rome.

The site was beginning to fill up now with the school children and the volume levels inside the Roman Theatre (Teatro Romano) were beginning to build so we left the amphitheatre and walked the short distance to the theatre next door. Two thousand years ago this would have been a massive entertainment centre for the city and today we were going to see it being used for its original purpose. Although we couldn’t get down close to the stage area and the columns and the statues and the central seating area was full of chattering and excitable school children we could make our way around the upper circle and visitors were invited to stay awhile and watch the production. We sat and watched for about half an hour but it was a three hour show and struggling with interpretation we finally left and moved on.

After a drink and the inevitable dish of olives we walked past the amphitheatre house, which was closed but which we could see through the chain link fencing, and then made our way to the Roman Circus which would have been quite a way outside the walls of the Roman city. On the way we called in at a tourist information office and they told us to hurry because it would be closing soon for lunch.

Although we have now visited a number of Roman amphitheatres we had never been to a racetrack before and this place was stunning in its layout and sheer size. There is nothing left of the grandstands because these have all been dismantled and the stone used elsewhere but it was easy to imagine what it might have looked like simply by thinking about the Charlton Heston film ‘Ben Hur’ because it was in such a place as this that the Roman chariot races took place. Inside what was the arena it was peaceful and quiet with a carpet of rough grass and wild meadow flowers but with a little imagination it was possible to imagine what a place like this would have been like on race days when there was capacity for thirty-thousand boozed-up cheering spectators!

Leaving the circus we walked along another busy road looking for the site of the aqueducts because although they are not as spectacular or as complete as that of Segovia there are approximately eight kilometres of aqueduct running into and through the city. We found the largest and most complete, the Aqueducto los Milagros in a green park on the edge of the town with each towering arch topped with an untidy nest of twigs and a family of Storks.

We had been walking for four hours now and Kim’s whinge metre was beginning to twitch so this was a good time to find somewhere for lunch. It proved surprisingly difficult to find something suitable and one thing that Mérida did seem to lack was a good selection of street cafés and bars. The ones we liked were full and those that weren’t didn’t tempt us. Eventually, after we had passed underneath Trajan’s Arch on the way back to the centre we came across a place in a side alley off the main shopping street where, partly our own fault it has to be said, although we had a nice salad, we paid a hefty price for it and then sulked for half an hour or so afterwards. It seemed that we had paid the full price for a menu of the day even though we hadn’t chosen or eaten all of the courses. A lesson learned!



Italy 2011, Rome, The Roman Forum and Italian Unification

The tour began from outside the Colosseum and went first past the Arch of Constantine where Silvio explained that this was the only Roman monument that still had its marble reliefs intact because successive Christian regimes in Rome after the fall of the Empire were reluctant to destroy a monument commemorating the first Christian Emperor. And then we made our way into the Forum and began to climb towards the top of the Palatine Hill stopping frequently to listen to and absorb more information from Silvio. After a while he became quite tedious and increasingly annoying with stories about himself and the exposition of his own personal theories so after the aqueduct, the stadium, the palace of Augustus and the Domus Flavia we had a quick discussion and the consensus view was that we should slip away from the group and explore the ruins by ourselves without the irritating narrative.

High on this hill overlooking the Forum was apparently a pleasant place to live because the site intercepted the welcome breezes coming in from the west and it was relatively free from the dust and diseases of the Forum below. According to legend Romulus and Remus were brought up here by a wolf in a cave. Later, the orator Cicero had a house here, Augustus was born here and lived with his wife Livia and the Emperors Tiberius, Caligula and Diocletian all built extravagant palaces on this site.

There was a path that took us to the bottom of the Palatine and into the Forum which for the Romans was the centre of political, commercial and judicial life. According to the playwright Plautus the area ‘teemed with lawyers and litigants, bankers and brokers, shopkeepers and strumpets’. As the city grew successive Emperors increasingly extended the Forum and in turn built bigger temples, larger basilicas, higher triumphal columns and more lavish commemorative arches. We started at one of these, the arch of Titus, and followed the original Roman street down into the heart of the Forum past the Temple of Romulus and the house of the Vestal Virgins and then the Temple of Julius Caesar erected on the very spot that he was cremated following his assassination in 44 BC.

It was very hot now and we were becoming weary as we walked along the uneven streets and through dusty excavations. We visited a small museum which provided some temporary relief from the sun but we were soon back outside walking past the Temples of Saturn and Vespasian and finally leaving through another arch, this one erected to the memory of the Emperor Septimius Severus after which we climbed some steps and found some welcome shade and took a quick break from the schedule.

Although there was still lots of Rome to see and we couldn’t possibly hope to achieve it all in just two days in the middle of an exceptional heat wave we had one last area to visit before walking back to the train station.

The Capitol, the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill was the centre of the Roman world and the Temple of Jupiter was the scene of the most important religious and political ceremonies. We approached the top via a zig-zag path up from the Forum into the Michelangelo designed Piazza Campidoglio with a statue of Marcus Aurelius dominating the centre of the geometric paving and the Renaissance façades of the surrounding buildings. We descended by the Cordonata staircase and passed the adjacent Aracoeli staircase where according to popular belief if you climb the one hundred and twenty-four steps on your knees then you significantly improve your chances of winning the Italian lottery. No one was attempting it today either because it simply isn’t true or on account of the searing heat!

After the unification of Italy in 1861 the Italian State planned a massive memorial, the Victor Emmanuel Monument, to commemorate the achievement and at the northern end of the Capitol constructed a huge white marble edifice which although impressive is far too big and sadly out of place amongst the mellow ochre stones of the surrounding buildings and it is unloved and savagely mocked by modern Romans who call it the wedding cake or the typewriter amongst other unflattering names. Today the National Monument looked especially immaculate as part of the hundred and fifty year celebrations to mark unification and the twelve metre long equestrian statue of the first King of Italy was flanked appropriately on either side by Italian tricolour flags dancing delicately in the occasional breeze.

After two days and several kilometres of walking around Rome we were exhausted now so set off in the general direction of the station. Christine almost bought the souvenirs she needed but unwanted intervention from Kim stopped the transaction at the very last moment necessitating more souvenir shop visits as we walked along Via Cavour (the first prime minister of Italy) stopping about half way along for a much needed rest and a drink, which we were glad of despite the excessive price.

I think it is fair to say that by the time we reached the Termini and walked the final four hundred metres to the platform we were all completely done-in as we boarded the cream and blue train, found seats and enjoyed the ride back through nine stations and stops to Albano Laziale thankful for a seat and a carriage air-conditioning unit.

On the way back to the hotel we had a stop at what had become our favourite bar and this being our fourth visit we were treated to complimentary tapas like bar snacks while we sat in the shade and reviewed the two days of visiting Rome. Later we returned to the same trattoria that we liked and as this was our last night ordered more food than we really needed, paid a little more than we had expected and, too embarrassed to leave it, wastefully threw some away on the short walk back to the hotel.