Architecture of Provence
The architecture of Provence includes a rich collection of monuments from the Roman era, Cistercian monasteries from the Romanesque period, medieval castles and fortifications, as well as numerous hilltop villages and fine churches.
Provence, in the southeast corner of France, corresponds with the modern administrative region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and includes the departments of Var, Bouches-du-Rhône, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, as well as parts of Alpes-Maritimes and Vaucluse.
was discovered in Marseille near the current Saint Charles railway station, which has remains of walls made of baked clay with holes for posts, as well as tools.
Marseille was founded in about 546 BC by Greek colonists coming from the city of Phocaea (now Foça, in modern Turkey) on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, who were fleeing an invasion by the Persians.
[2] According to the historian Strabo and other ancient sources, the city of Massalia had temples to Apollo and Artemis, but no trace of them remains.
The only remaining structure from ancient Massalia are the cellars of Saint-Sauveur, near the Place de Lenche in Marseille.
[4] In the 2nd century BC, the Romans began their conquest of the region, sending legions which defeated the Ligurians and destroyed their fortresses.
In 123 BC the Romans founded Aquae Sextiae, and two years later began a new town at Nemausa (today Nîmes.)
In the 1st century BC, Roman legions completed the conquest of Gaul and began building towns, triumphal arches, amphitheatres, theatres, public baths and aqueducts in Provence.
In the center of the building is an octagonal baptismal font 1.3 meters deep and 92 centimetres long, large enough for the person baptized to be immersed in the water.
The Abbey is famous for its 11th–14th century graves, carved in the rock, its subterranean crypt, and its massive unfinished church.
Le Corbusier visited the monastery in 1953 and imitated the play of light and shadow in his priory of Sainte Marie de La Tourette, near Lyon.
Aix Cathedral (Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur d'Aix) in Aix-en-Provence shows the transition from Romanesque to Gothic architecture.
The basilica was consecrated in 1316, but the Black Death in 1348, which killed half the local population, interrupted construction.
Work continued until 1532, when it was decided to leave the basilica just as it was, with an unfinished west front, and neither a portal nor bell towers.
It served as the residence of two antipopes, Clement VII and Benedict XIII, before the papal court finally returned permanently to Rome.
Only in the 17th century, after the Wars of Religion had ended and the French king had established his authority, were the towns of Provence safe from outside attack.
It is famous for its pinkish and yellow stone; in the 18th century, mines around the town produced pigment to make the color ochre.
Les Baux-de-Provence, on a high rocky hilltop in the Bouches-du-Rhône department, was inhabited as early as 6000 BC.
In the Middle Ages, the Lords of Les Baux, who claimed ancestry back to Balthazar, one of the Three Kings of the Nativity, ruled over a domain of 79 towns and villages.
The Château of Tarascon, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department, was begun in 1400 by Louis II of Anjou, and finished by his son, René.
The Citadel of Sisteron, was built on a rocky spur overlooking the Durance River on the strategic route through the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea.
Then, from 1590 to 1597, Jean Erard, the military architect of king Henry IV, built a new kind of fortification designed to defeat armies with cannons and modern weapons.
The age of Louis XIV in Provence was marked by an increase in prosperity, after the destructive Wars of Religion in the previous century.
The citizens of Arles built a new Hôtel de ville (town hall), designed by the Arles architect Jacques Peytret aided by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, which had a large central court with a perfectly smooth vaulted ceiling, without a central column, supported entirely by the carefully joined stones resting on fine Doric columns.
It boasted exceptional acoustics and seats for 1800 spectators, making it, after Paris, the second-largest opera house in France.
The Basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde in Marseille was built between 1853 and 1864 on the highest point in the city in the neo-Byzantine style.
A mas a largely self-sufficient economic unit, which could produce fruits, vegetables, meat, milk, and even silk.
The house was usually built of local stone with a sloping Roman tile roof, and was a long rectangle, two or three stories high, with the kitchen and space for animals on the ground floor, and bedrooms, storage space for food, and often a room for raising silkworms on the first floor.
Built of unfinished concrete (steel was not available because of the war), it had nineteen stories with 330 apartments of twenty different designs, along with shops, a restaurant, a hotel, clinic, sports facilities, a roof terrace, an outdoor auditorium, and a kindergarten.
