Marseille Does Not Want to Be Liked
Two weeks in a city that refuses to perform for visitors, a ferry to a prison island, and a walk into the Calanques that I got slightly wrong.
Marseille is the oldest city in France and behaves like the newest. Nothing is restored into submission. The Vieux-Port has a mirrored steel canopy by a famous architect on one side and, on the other, men selling fish out of plastic crates onto folding tables at seven in the morning, shouting prices in a dialect that has absorbed Italian, Arabic, Corsican and Provençal and kept the fastest parts of each.
I stayed thirteen nights, the longest stop so far, mostly because on day four I stopped trying to see things.
The staircase is the introduction
Trains arrive at Saint-Charles on a terrace above the city, and you leave the station by descending a monumental flight of steps directly into the noise. It is the best arrival in Europe. You get the whole place at once: the tiled roofs falling away south, the cranes at the industrial port to the north, Notre-Dame de la Garde on its limestone knuckle, and a smell of diesel and bread.
Le Panier, the old quarter above the port, has been getting called "up-and-coming" for about thirty years. What it actually is: very steep, very hot by April, painted in ochre and pale blue, and full of workshops that make one thing each. I bought soap from a woman who cuts it off a block with a wire. €4.20 for a piece the size of a brick.
Château d'If, and the correct way to be disappointed
The ferry crosses to the Frioul archipelago and stops at the island prison from The Count of Monte Cristo. The fortress is small, hot, largely empty of exhibits, and the cells are labelled with the names of fictional prisoners because the real ones were mostly unremarkable Protestants and political inconveniences.
It is a mildly bad museum on a spectacular rock. Go for the rock. The crossing back at golden hour, with the city rising out of the haze and the wind coming up, is worth the entire €11.60 on its own, and the boat is full of teenagers who have made the trip four hundred times and are looking at their phones.
A city that has been an entry point for three thousand years does not need you to find it charming. This is enormously relaxing.
I walked into the Calanques and got it slightly wrong
South-east of the city the limestone drops into the sea in a series of fjord-like inlets, and you can reach them on the number 21 bus followed by your own legs. I set out for Calanque de Sugiton with two litres of water, which was not enough, at 11am, which was too late, in trail shoes with worn tread, which on polished limestone is a genuinely stupid decision.
What I should have done, and what I did on the second attempt four days later: leave at 06:30, carry three litres, check the risque incendie rating that closes the massif on windy summer days, and take the longer path down rather than the scramble. The reward is water the colour of bottle glass, forty metres below a cliff of white rock, in April, with maybe nine other people in sight.
Eating
Bouillabaisse is a €65 institution and I did not have it. What I had instead, repeatedly, was panisse — chickpea-flour batons, fried, salted, sold in paper cones near the Estaque for €3.50 — and pizza from a wood oven built into the back of a van, cut with scissors, sold by weight. Marseille's real cuisine is portable and eaten standing near water.
Thirteen nights. I have not run out of streets. But there is a valley in the Bernese Oberland where the snow is starting to go, and the timing on that is not negotiable.