Rhone Day 8: Grignan

We have had two wine tastings and an olive oil tasting. Today it was truffles. And I don't mean the chocolate kind. So what is a truffle? It's an edible fungus that costs $1,000-3,000 per pound. Our farmer spoke only French so our local guide translated his explanation while the dog-lovers in our group made over his canine assistants.

This lovely wood is full of them, growing in a symbiotic relationship with the trees. It's finding them that is the challenge.

Our farmer uses dogs instead of the pigs you may have heard of. Pigs love truffles and will consume them before you have a chance to dig them up if you can't haul them off quickly enough. Dogs can be trained to sniff out the ripe truffles, paw the ground to show where they are just an inch or so below the surface, and be happily rewarded with a treat as this one is here. 

New ones ripen every day, so dog and master go daily for a walk in the woods and return with a few thousand dollars in the master's pockets.

I thought the truffle would be soft like a mushroom (a different species of fungus) but the outside is hard as a rock. It reminded me of a geode with something precious inside.

We tasted a variety of spreads on bits of toasted baguette with glasses of local wine. Lovely! My favorite was truffle with black olive. 

We had some time to explore the near-by village of Grignan.

It was market day. The strawberries were oh so sweet!

At the top of the street is the old laundry. (Not quite what I had in mind when the women of Bethlehem are washing clothes at the fountain in my recent book The Innkeeper's Wife.)

One side is for washing, the other for rinsing.

It was no longer cloudy, as you can see, but it was still quite cold and VERY windy. The mistral winds sweep down the Rhone valley at as much as 60 mph. They almost blew us off our feet climbing to this castle.

The views were fabulous.

Ingrid had to stop to get her balance in the wind as we rounded the castle walls to this church.

The roof of the church is the terrace of the castle.

Windows can only be on the south side of the church since the north is built into the mountain.

We hiked back down delightful little streets and stairways,

Returning to our ship and the cruise to our next stop: Lyon

We enjoyed the evening's recital as we sailed.

*Jacques Offenbach – Can-Can from Orpheus in the Underworld

 

Fréderic Chopin – Minute Waltz (originally titled the Little Dog Waltz, in honor of those who sniffed out truffles for us in the morning)

 

Fréderic Chopin – Winterwind Etude (in honor of the powerful Mistral!)

 

*Jules Massenet – Meditation from the opera Thaïs

 

George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue (written by one of many American composers who searched out Nadia Boulanger in Paris for composition lessons)

 

*Maurice Jarre – Lara’s Theme from Dr. Zhivago (Jarre was born in Lyon)

Rhone Day 7: Avignon

Do NOT watch this video. If you do, you won't be able to stop singing "Sur le Pont d'Avignon l'on y danse, l'on y danse. 

Whoops! Probably just reading those words has already put the 15th-c folksong in your head. Sorry about that, but we were singing it for a couple days in and around Avignon.

There is enough traffic on the river that at times two boats moor side by side with passengers passing through one to get to the other. In Avignon, we were the boat on the outside, transiting the lobby of the other boat to reach the dock. Last evening when the inner boat was ready to embark, rather than wait mid-river, our captain took us on a short cruise to "le pont d'Avignon". Actually, the Saint Benezet Bridge.

The original wooden bridge was completed in 1185, but was burned by soldiers in 1226. It was rebuilt in stone, but river flooding destroyed it so often that efforts to rebuild were abandoned in the 17th century. Now it is more like a pier, too narrow for much dancing in the round.

The next morning we were off for a walking tour of Avignon. The day was still cold and cloudy so my pictures are disappointing, but at least it was not as windy as yesterday.

Avignon looked like a stereotype of a fairytale town. the walls were built in the high middle ages, and I suppose illustrators of fairy tales have often used them for inspiration.

Of course, it is also a modern city, and just inside the medieval walls are modern apartment buildings.

Notre Dame des Doms was originally built in the 12th-c with renovations in the 15th and 17th. It's beautiful, but we were headed to the 14th-c Palais des Papes.

past narrow lanes

and the modern (19th-c) Hotel de Ville (town hall).

The palace really did look like something out of a fairytale.

Ingrid suggested this might be the popes' helipad.

This is essentially what the interior of the palace looked like when the troops moved out and restoration began in 1906. 

The French Revolution (beginning in 1789) was, of course, no friend to the Catholic Church which had supported the aristocracy in their abuse of the people for centuries. Churches and palaces like this, which were still papal lands even after the popes returned to Rome, were sacked. You can see on the walls of this hall where it was divided into three stories as a barracks to house soldiers. Windows were knocked in the medieval wall on the left to let light into the second and third floors. Those have since been refilled in the restoration.

Even the chapel was divided into multiple floors. The pointed tops of the gothic windows were removed as too religious, and restored in the twentieth century.

I'm a suckor for miniatures. This one shows the palace complex.

I'm also a sucker for cozy places to sit with a cup of tea and a book, although I would want some nice needlepoint cushions to enjoy this one.

Our local guide focused on the architecture and the broadest sketches of history, avoiding the opulence and corruption the Avignon popes were famous for. I wished I had spent a bit more time reading up on them before coming. The whole things started when French Pope Clement V refused to move to Rome. Avignon was a much nicer place to live at the time. Rome was a dirty heap of ancient ruins. I imagine it was like a choice between New York and Cairo, IL.

This courtyard was being prepared for the annual Avignon Arts Festival when we came through. I guess it takes months to set up and months to take down the stage for the three weeks in July. It would have been fun to be here at the right time, although I expect Southern France is miserable in summer.

The evening's recital was a survey of French music from the Middle Ages to the Romantic era-

 

Johannes Regis, Burgundian school – L’homme armée (this secular tune, written in the Middle Ages, as represented by the Pope’s Palace, became the basis of Latin masses for 150 years. This performance also represented Jackie’s singing debut in France!)

 

*Jean Baptiste Lully – Menuett (with just a hint of Sur le pont d’Avignon while Aloysia was tuning)

 

Jean-Philippe Rameau – La Poule from Pièces de Clavecin (it wasn’t only the Impressionists who had colorful titles, and conveniently chicken was also on the dinner menu that evening)

 

Robert Schumann – Introduction to Faschingschwank aus Wien (in which Schumann cheekily includes a reference to the Marseilles, which was banned in Vienna at the time because of its revolutionary connotations)

 

*Gabriel Fauré – Sicilienne

 

*César Franck – 1^st and 2^nd movements from Sonata for violin and piano

 

*Louiguy (Edith Piaf) – La Vie en Rose

Tomorrow: Truffle farm and the village of Gringon

Rhone Day 6: St. Remy-de-Provence

For a long time the funerary monument on the left (30-20 BC) was the only visible remains at St. Remy of the Roman town of Glanum. The bottom two layers were buried in the accumulation of centuries and only the columns at the top were visible until excavations began in 1921. The triumphal arch to the right (completely buried before 1921) dates from about 20 AD. Having spent a summer on an excavation in the Negev, I would have enjoyed seeing the excavations of the Roman town nearby, but we didn't have time.

St. Remy has a lovely old city where we had free time for lunch or shopping. Ingrid and I aren't shoppers. We wandered the streets and ended up at a delightful cafe on the edge of the old town with more locals than tourists.

Vincent Van Gogh spent more than a year in the St.-Paul de Mausole sanitarium. Fortunately the doctors here thought painting was excellent therapy. Van Gogh painted 150 masterpieces while he was here where he found inspiration in the scenery. Note the trees and mountains in this picture taken outside the monastery gates.

Then notice the trees and mountains in this Van Gogh reproduction in the garden.

Van Gogh painted a lot of irises while he was here as well.

Here is one of the old wards.

Van Gogh had a private room in the still-functioning men's ward, but this is what it would have looked like.

The place is still a functioning mental hospital with the Van Gogh museum between a men's ward and a women's ward. Several of us agreed as we got back on the bus: if I ever lose my mind, you can send me here.

People are coming earlier and earlier to secure good seats for the early evening recital. An hour wasn't early enough today, but we figured others should have a turn. 

Giacomo Puccini – Overture and Musetta’s Waltz from La Bohème (in honor of our olive oil tasting; Berio has made a special olive oil commemorating Puccini’s love of the stuff)

 

Serge Rachmaninoff – Prelude in C-sharp Minor (in honor of the rocks of Les Baux, a very famous piece by ROCK…maninoff…)

 

*Charles Gounod – Ave Maria (Gounod lived in St. Remy while composing operas)

 

Serge Rachmaninoff – Daisies (in the absence of a piece based on irises, this was a reflection on visiting the asylum where Van Gogh spent time and created extraordinary paintings of nature)

Tomorrow will the the Palace of the Popes at Avignon.

Rhone Day 6: Olive Oil Tasting and Les Beaux-de-Provence

We started the morning as usual with a tasty breakfast on the Van Gogh. French cooking is famous, but as far as I'm concerned its bread where they most excel--crispy croissants, pain au chocolat, baguettes, and there was some kind of dark bread full of seeds that someone said was Norwegian. "Sticks and twigs," my husband would have called it. Wonderful with cheese!

First thing on the day's agenda was an olive oil tasting at Fontvielle. I've never thought of oil as something I wanted to taste by itself, but these were delicious and quite different flavors based just on the pressings, not infusions of other ingredients. Some we tasted with bits of toasted baguette, some just the oil itself.

Then we went out to see the trees.

It wasn't the season for olives, but this little guy was hanging on.

This was our coldest, most miserable day. Fortunately, most of us had checked the weather forecasts before we left home and were prepared for something less springlike than we had been having. I wore long underwear, a jacket, a heavy Scandinavian sweater, and gloves and did not regret a bit of it. Especially at Les Beaux-de-Provence where the wind blew fiercely on the heights.

This is a medieval town perched high on a mesa with the valley below and rocky outcroppings around. 

One of the problems of a group tour is that you don't have time to do all the things you would like. We didn't make it as far as the castle, but we went as far as the church.

Beautiful in its simplicity.

The White Penitents Chapel across the square from the church has frescoes by the modern artist Yves Breyer.

They show the shepherds at Bethlehem as though they were French peasants.

There has been a print shop in this town since the 19th century.   

We had a demonstration on an 18th-c hand press.

I would have loved time to stop at a cafe like this one (note the view of the valley through the arch), but frankly, it was way too cold.

A town worth coming back to.

On to St. Remys-de-Provence.