This is my favorite place in Marseille. A very large square with a fountain, no cars, lined with great cafés and restaurants. It’s always packed with outdoor seating, musicians, playing children, eclectic art stores, and people sitting together and enjoying the Mediterranean sun. Street art is everywhere, in the square and the adjoining streets, which…

Cassis is a fishing village on the Mediterranean Côte d’Azur in the south of France. It gets a lot of tourists but has mostly kept its charm from less crowded times. The old harbor is a string of French (what else) restaurants serving fresh fish. And there is a lot of natural beauty stretching to…

This year, the olympic games will be held in Paris. They lit the olympic flame in Olympia and brought it to Marseille on a historic sailing ship, the Bélem. I was there at the old harbor when it arrived, together with what felt like half of Marseille. The banner shows the flame being carried through…

Nantes is a French city near the point where the Loire meets tje Atlantic. City landmarks are usually cathedrals or other buildings, but Nantes has an elephant. The elephant is a giant mechanical steampunk animal with three floors, built by an artist collective that also built all kinds of other mechanical animals. Some are tiny,…

I spent about two and a half years living in Marseille, at the Mediterranean coast, at the boundary between the Côte d’Azur and the Côte Bleue (which both mean blue coast). Beautiful place, We had no time to hike in the Calanques, the Côte d’Azur’s most stunningly beautiful limestone min-fjords in the mountains at the…

The Luberon is a hilly region in France, southwest of the French Alps. It is stunningly beautiful and captures everything you have read about France except the Eiffel Tower. Very green, ancient villages built from rough rocks, cobblestones, flowers, Lavender. We spent two days traveling to the villages of Lourmarin, Saignon, Roussillon with its ochre…

There hasn’t always been a single pope. On occasion they couldn’t agree who gets the hat and ended up with multiple popes fighting each other. During this period, from 1309 to 1376, when they had up to three popes and they clearly couldn’t all be in Rome, Avignon was a papal seat for seven successive…