Having returned from our recent trip to Avignon, I went through old Easy Hiker posts to check what we had posted from our previous visits of the town – and found, much to my surprise, that the answer was: nothing.
Nothing at all! Was that even possible? We must have visited Avignon at least four or five times over the years – could it be that we really never found anything that we deemed worthwhile of sharing with you? Apparently yes.
Since we have made it a principle to rarely let a trip (any trip) go by without carving a post out of the experience, there had to be reasons for exempting – of all destinations – the most storied town in southern France.
After much soul-searching, I have found two such reasons.
Firstly, we always try to be original in our posts: to say something that has not been said many times before. We do not kid ourselves: it is increasingly difficult, in the modern world of over-travelling and over-sharing, to find anything that is “new” in the old sense of the word, but we always try to find a fresh angle on the destinations we visit – or, at least, to combine familiar elements into something that resembles an original work (which is how pop music composers craft their songs).
And where even that is not possible, we rather concede than rephrase platitudes. Apparently, we found that there was not much new to say about Avignon and its most famous feature – the string of medieval popes – that had not been said hundreds of times before.
Secondly, we are still a hiking site, and although the days of 20-km-long schleps through mountainous wildernesses are firmly behind us, we honour the traditions of our blog sufficiently to refrain from classifying something like a walk down the corridor of a papal palace as a “hike” – because, as Tevje the Milkman memorably said, stretching traditions this far would break not only the traditions themselves but also, ultimately, those who have so blatantly offended against their own long-held beliefs.
Here’s the Avignon With No Jiggery-Popery
This is why we held our posting breath until our most recent visit to Avignon, when we finally discovered something that ticked the two Easy Hiker boxes.
The Avignon Tourism Board’s “Through The Years of Yesterday” is both a proper walk and offers a fresh view: the definitive Easy Hiking experience in Provence.
The walk has been around for a while: you can find the route (highlighted in green) in a brochure issued by the local tourism office, …
… but it is not so widely known that it could not benefit from wider distribution.
We have done several such municipal-tourism-office walks before and found that many of them suffered – to various extents – from the same defect: an inability to imagine what visitors may look for on such a walk, combined with a great love for the finer details of municipal history and the lives of the great and not-so-great who once inhabited the town.
Do you want to find out where King Henri IV had a hearty lunch in X-ville during his visit in 1562? Or which elementary school Stendhal attended in Y-bourg? Then these routes are just the ticket for you to enjoy the Avignon with no jiggery-popery.
The Avignon Tourism Board’s “Walk Through The Years of Yesterday”, however, is different, concentrating more on sights than on historic trifles …
… and does it so well that, after the first two or three street scenes of stunning beauty that you have walked into, …
… you will begin to look forward to every twist and turn in the route, curious to find out what surprise may lie in wait for you behind the next corner.
You will be rarely disappointed.
The walk also provides an introduction into the city’s visual culture. It features urban art of various types, frequently copies of famous paintings …
… but also many examples for what seems to be the local urban artists’ specialty: quirky imaginings of what may be going on behind windows that have been bricked up.
Trompe l’oeil that is not really meant to deceive the eye, only to attract it. No, that is not really the king of France peeking out of the 3rd floor window here.
The star of the show is certainly the sheer variety of idyllic urban motifs, from still life versions of a prosperous town in Provence …
… to images of soothing serenity.
But whereas this variety can only be fully appreciated when you have enough space in your travel schedule to dedicate roughly half a day to the walk, there is one street on the trail that you should visit even if you do not have the time to walk the entire route.
That is the Rue des Tinturiers.
Today, this street is easily Avignon’s most picturesque, and it is hard to believe that this cobblestoned alley was for five centuries, from the Middle Ages to the late 1800s, Avignon’s industrial heart.
In the shadow of the 14th century abbey whose buildings still line the street today, the manufacturers of colourful indienne fabrics plied their trade.
At the height of the street’s commercial activity, 23 paddle wheels along the canal supplied the industry with energy, four of which still exist today.
The “Walk Through The Years of Yesterday” is full of such moments of discovery, but if we set out to prove that it is possible to visit Avignon without running into some sort of jiggery-popery, we must ultimately concede defeat.
We were almost there – but then, close to the end of the trail near the busy Rue de la République, we stepped into a non-descript side street, and there they were, …
… the whole lot of them: a full set of the guys who opted to do their papal business in Avignon under the close supervision of the French kings, the seven “legit” ones as well as the two anti-popes who insisted on staying behind when the official papal court had moved back to Rome.
Oh well: it seems you cannot escape the popes in Avignon. But you can keep them and their architectural legacy at a distance – and shimmering from afar through the colourful leaves on a sunny autumn day, those bulky papal palaces almost manage to look graceful and delicate.
