The Motor Routes of France: To the Châteaux of Touraine, Biarritz, the Pyrenees, the Riviera, & the Rhone ValleyHome, Gordon
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The Motor Routes of France: To the Châteaux of Touraine, Biarritz, the Pyrenees, the Riviera, & the Rhone Valley
Home, Gordon
Automobile travel -- France -- Guidebooks; France -- Description and travel
=Tarascon.=--Picturesque little town by the Rhone; Gothic church,
with fine Romanesque south portal; gateway of town ramparts;
château of King Réné, fifteenth century.
=Beaucaire.=--A depressing little town, facing Tarascon across the
Rhone; fine castle of Montmorency on Roman site.
From Aix to Avignon direct is less than 50 miles, but the longer route
through St. Rémy and Tarascon is well worth the extra 18 miles.
The first village is St. Cannat, where the remains of a castle of the
Bishops of Marseilles can be seen, and also the pilgrimage chapel of
Notre Dame de la Vie. The road then begins to go through an open
country, broken up with a curious formation of rocky ridges, through
which the road has been cut. The whole neighbourhood was badly shaken
with an earthquake in 1909, and Lambesc and other villages suffered very
severely.
Sénas is a small stone village without interest, but Orgon, the next
place, is strikingly situated between a precipitous limestone ridge and
the wide bed of the River Durance, spanned at this point with a huge
lattice girder railway-bridge. On the summit of the ridge are the
picturesque ruins of a château of the Counts of Provence, twice
dismantled, and also the Chapel of Notre Dame de Beauregard. The town
has preserved part of its ramparts and several picturesque houses of the
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The church dates from
1325.
Five kilometres north of Orgon the road to St. Rémy goes off to the
left, and runs along the north side of the isolated group of hills
called Les Alpines. Long rows of tall cypresses stand by the roadside in
vast perspectives, and help to mitigate the fierce mistral when it comes
shrieking over the desolate plains of the Rhone’s delta.
ST. RÉMY
is a pleasant town with tree-lined streets and a fourteenth-century
tower to its church, which is modern. About a mile to the south, on the
site of the Phœnician town of _Glanum Livii,_ afterwards Romanized,
stand two remarkably fine relics of the first four centuries of this
era. One is a Roman triumphal arch, half destroyed above, but still
retaining finely coffered work inside the arch and some sculptured
figures outside; the other is a magnificently preserved mausoleum of
three stories, 50 feet high, and built of the same orange-coloured
sandstone as the arch. The base is adorned with bas-reliefs of battle
and hunting scenes, and on the top is a peristyle of ten Corinthian
columns, containing two statues (with modern heads) representing the
parents of Sextus and Marius, of the family of the Julii, by whom it was
erected. The situation of these remarkable structures on a rocky little
plateau is most striking.
TARASCON
Keeping along the foot of Les Alpines for about 9 kilometres farther,
one swings to the right to the interesting old town of Tarascon, which
faces Beaucaire on the opposite side of the mud-coloured Rhone. A long
suspension bridge joins the two towns.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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