On a perfect late-summer evening, as I drive from the airport into Marseille , the sun is setting on one side of the sky and a full moon is rising on the other. Everything is enveloped by soft pink light, the kind you often find in areas colonized by the ancient Greeks. Few places make my heart beat faster than Mediterranean ports β cities of arrival and departure, where there's always a sense of possibility in the air.
In Marseille, one of Europe's oldest shipping hubs, I feel immediately at home. I have come to search for traces of painters of the past and visit new sites of contemporary art. Once immortalized by the Impressionists, today Provence is enlivened by rising generations of artists and architects, as well as ingenious chefs and hoteliers.
Who better to join me on a journey through past and present than my mother, an art historian who has been taking me to museums since I was a baby? She arrives the next morning off a red-eye flight from the U. I haven't seen her since before the pandemic, and I realize how much I've missed her. Our first stop is the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, or Mucem , an institution dedicated to the history and culture of the region, and particularly of Marseille, which has been a mishmash for thousands of years.
Opened in , it was designed by French architect Rudi Ricciotti, who linked it by elevated walkway to a historic structure called Fort St. The walkway offers views out to sea, where giant ferries ply their way to Corsica and Algeria, and inland, where two modern office towers rise.
Jean Nouvel's is flashy red, white, and blue; Zaha Hadid's is more elegant and resembles two pillars of glass leaning into one another. Though less than an hour from anarchic, spirited Marseille, Aix feels like another world β quiet, baked by the sun, with pleasant streets and plazas with gurgling fountains.
