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 Aix,
like the region of Provence itself, is a mosaic of its past, shaped,
colored, and pasted together by time. Its vestiges stand, self-contained
and visible among a bustling present; each day the children of
the école Grassi pass by fragments of a Roman villa, and
the children of the école Campra throng through mediaeval
ramparts whose origins are only partially discernible among
the bars, video stores, sex shop, and apartments that have stormed
their battlements. The generous springs which supply Aix‘s
fountains and thermal waters still chant their brief moments in
the sun, as they splash their way toward the valley, reminding
us as they go that they gave “Aix” its first name: Aquae
Sextiae Salluviorum, the Sextian waters of a Celto-Ligurian tribe
that once dominated the region from its oppidum less than a mile
to the north.
So
it goes, and so it has gone for centuries. Names, myth, legend,
and reality jumbled amiably for the visitors to recompose their
own picture of a city whose origins, by one of history‘s
many backfires, gave birth to a thriving city, a Roman colony,
now known for its university, its courts of law, its elegant town
houses, its spa, its international music festival,
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and for the
intimate beauty that haunts its narrow streets and squares. In a time
warp that we call the present, somewhere between the dinosoaurs that roamed
the escarpments of the Mont Sainte Victoire and our twenty first century
with its swish and rumble highways, its hi-tech industry, its high rise
apartments and its hypermarkets, a soul hovers in the lives and art of
its inhabitants. Their houses, sculpture, poetry, history, their churches,
convents, and monuments survive pell mell, some to perpetuate their original
calling, many to suffer “conversion” into hotels, conference
centers, dry cleaners, cafés, and banks.
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crossroads since time immemorial for travellers heading north from
Marseille toward the Alps or up the Rhône valley, and east-west
“commuting” between Italy and Spain, Aix, blest by its
plentiful water, has always been a site endowed by nature for “staging.”
Until 1960 shepherds drove their flocks through its narrow streets
on their way to Alpine pasture in the spring, returning in the fall
before the snows arrived. Today the “transhumance” lumbers
by on trucks and the sheep, like their human contemporaries, submit
to a mass transport system less picturesque, less dignified. |
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