Walking Tour

 We met at 10 at the Tourisme Office – Frederick our guide, a French Family of beautiful mother and two teenage sons (she’s making them do the English language tour because it’s good for their language) and a middle-aged couple from Chicago. Middle-aged. Huh. My age.

What I had hoped would be the Underbelly of Aix Tour wasn’t to be as that one was in French. No point in the nitty gritty being aired if you can’t understand 50% of the stories, let alone the nuances..

So this was a ‘the Invisible is Visible Tour’ with lots of gorgeous details about things that I had walked past but of which I hadn’t appreciated the significance. The street with numbering which starts at 0, the Cour Mirabeau with numbering which starts at 3. The statues holding up the entrance to one of the many mansions which belonged to a textile merchant who skimped on the folds of cloth covering the statues pubic hair – a middle finger to the neighbours who thought the merchant a tad uncouth.

Aix is well provided for in the fountain department – 107 in all. In Cour Mirabeau alone there are three if you don’t count the wonderful one at the roundabout to the entrance. 

(This statue is called the Four Dolphins - the locals call it Three Dolphins given that you can only ever see three at a time no matter how fast you run around the fountain..)

 (This statue on the side of a building has the scallop shell which shows that it is part of the Camino Trail - in Rue d'Italie.)

One of them includes the statue of a founding noble which was erected 4 centuries after his death – he wasn’t a popular man and when the statue arrived it was obvious that the face depicted in marble wasn’t that of the man it was to represent. No-one seems that concerned about this detail, what’s there is better looking than what was the reality.  One of the statues looks like a large lump of rock but not so, the large rock is an accumulation of minerals created from the natural warm spring which is the source of the water, and hidden in the mineral build up are statues of four children playing.

It was incredibly cold during the two hour tour and at one point when a coughing fit seized me (as we stood looking at an archaeological dig), I was tempted to vanish and find a corner in a café out of the Mistral wind, the northern hemisphere equivalent to our southerly wind.

I have bought a jumper and a scarf which seems ridiculous given that the temperatures in Croatia are still in the mid 30s but looking at the forecast for the Canal du Midi, I suspect I will need them. I will be on a train just after midday to travel to Toulouse – it will be lovely to catch up with friends again. x