05.09.07
Heading South Part III: Avignon
We couldn’t drive through Provence without a stop to Avignon, a white walled city with distinctive architecture and a rich, turbulent past. The main attraction is the Popes’ Palace (seen in the photo at left), a Gothic structure built between 1335 and 1364, and the home of seven Popes during their 14th-century “exile” from Rome. After the return to Rome, a schism occurred and two anti-popes continued to live in the Palace until 1403.
Each July, Avignon is host to an entirely different crowd when it holds the annual theater festival. Although I had been to the city many times before, when I went to the festival in 2002, it seemed to have transformed into a different place entirely. Every nook and cranny, restaurant and church, alleyway and green-space, became a stage for both experimental, contemporary plays and now “classics” by Genet and Sartre. The festival was originally intended to bring theater to the masses, but the rebellious 1968 crowd deemed it part of the establishment, and thus created their own Avignon festival, called the “Festival Off.” To be honest, it all blends together in my mind, so I believe you can’t go wrong, as I was not disappointed with any of the plays I saw.
Lastly, who could forget the children’s song, Sur le Pont d’Avignon? “Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse…” A quick google search yielded this interesting World-War I version of the song, Sur le pont des Nations (from the GreatWarDifferent website, an extensive online resource of primary WWI documents.) Click to enlarge images:
megan said,
May 9, 2007 at 4:49 am
Yay! We are going there in two weeks for our anniversary! Glad you had a good time.
rachel said,
May 9, 2007 at 8:22 am
You’ll have fun! I thought it was beautiful, and the view of the region from the Palace is amazing. Just walking around is great, too, since the city has nice little shops and delicious outdoor restaurants.
Grace said,
May 10, 2007 at 8:12 pm
ahem… isn’t it “l’on y danse”?
and you call yourself a French teacher.
rachel said,
May 10, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Good point, Grace, I promise that’s how I, too, learned the song! But I looked it up in a French children’s songbook and it says “On y danse” - so I thought I’d be lazy and leave out the “l’”