The oldest village in Gaul – 2,600 years old and some dust it seems – has no old town. It has an Old Port, of course, old cars parked along its old rutted sidewalks, a (very) old mayor, but no medieval or even simply Renaissance quarter like what you find in almost any French city, from Lille to Strasbourg, from Bordeaux to Lyon …
It’s like that. Marseille does not give a damn about its heritage and only maintains it under threat. Here, the only Roman ruins in the area, discovered fortuitously about forty years ago, were immediately re-buried under a hideous shopping center with the exception of a small garden long abandoned to dog punks returning from the festival of ‘Aurillac.
Okay, there is still, in the old old genre, the Hôtel de Cabre , a small building dating from the 16th century and whose particularity is to have escaped the German destruction of the last war and then to have been returned. like a crepe so that it looks better tidy, a 12th century abbey ( Saint-Victor , magnificent, we will talk about it again), four or five meters from a wall of undetermined origin at the entrance of the Regional Council and that’s all. Period. So much for the really vintage stuff.
Well, I’m exaggerating a bit because I’m becoming more and more Marseille by osmosis and that, between the suburbs that surround the port and two-three remarkable churches here and there , the list of postcard subjects is slightly longer, but it is to give a general idea and to breathe air into my bad faith …
In fact, the place that could play the role of the old town the most is the Panier , a tangle of alleys which I learn from Wikipedia that it was built on the very site of the Greek colony that gave birth in Marseille. For a long time ill-famed, in the sense that it was not good to walk there alone in the evening or even with several people during the day, it is now in the process of being transformed into a Provençal Marsh with tapas bars, picturesque guest houses, decoration shops and trendy clothes, artisans who work in windows for tourists … Me, I find it rather not bad and nice but, for the pure pork Marseillais, it is a real disaster, the authenticity of a district that can only really be preserved when its facades are leprosy and children covered with bedsores run barefoot in the gutter playing ball with a plastic bag stuffed with newspaper.
This booze was not without difficulty: twenty years ago, the little tourist trains that risked there were attacked in a stage coach from the Far West by vindictive kids and it was easier to find a killer for hire than a painting gallery on the Montée des Accoules . From now on, between contemporary art lovers who go to the Vieille-Charité and fans of Plus belle la vie who visit the official store of the series before going to eat a bad steak and fries at 22 euros place de Lenche, it’s just if we couldn’t leave our bike without tying it up in the street and find it ten minutes later …
Be careful, I am not making myself the unconditional advocate of the gentrification of a working-class district and the transfer of its traditional populations – formerly Italian, now Maghrebian – to some rabbit cage in the northern districts. Certainly not. And besides, that is absolutely not what happens, the Basket being more the example of the famous “social mix” to which we are all supposed to aspire than the proof of a new victory of ultraneoliberal capitalism. The Basket, even when it costs extra, no one has got their hands on it yet, if you like (I had to do it and I didn’t have a fall) …
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