After breakfast at the hotel, we set out on the Rick Steves walking tour of town. Arles is where Vincent Van Gogh came and lived during his most productive period, near the end of his life. Though he painted 200 pictures here, none is on display in Arles. The Easels are small enameled signs showing a painting and giving some information about it. They are situated where his easel was while painting the picture. We took a picture of the easel and then of what he had been looking at as it appears today. It was great fun. The Yellow House, where he lived and Gauguin visited, is no longer there – the victim on an errant WW11 bomb – but the building seen in the painting behind the house still exists. The Jardin d’Ete is pretty much the same though the foliage is obviously different. The Café at Night also looks the same, though its paint job is gaudy to make it look more like the painting during daylight hours. It’s in the Place du Forum, with a couple of other large outdoor cafes. The café is considered a tourist trap and the hipper visitors shun it.
Arles biggest attraction is the giant Roman Arena. It is still used today for events like their version of bull fighting. Unlike the Spanish sport (?), in Arles, the young bull enters the arena where young men try to attract its attention and then run to and jump up on the wall before the bull can harm them. It’s more like a big game of tag than brutal animal cruelty. The arena can hold 20,000 people on its 30 rows of stone (cold) seats that rise above the floor. Most of them are now covered by modern steel and wood bleachers.
The outside of the arena is a series of great arches and there are two enclosed arcades at different levels that run around the arena to facilitate egress. Between the openings to the seats in these arcades are small rooms that were obviously vendor stalls. Three typical Medieval towers are also part of the arena. One is open to walk to the top, which, of course, I did. The view was magnificent. Beginning in Medieval times and extending into the 1800s, the arches were bricked up and the arena became a walled city of 200 small homes.
Above the arena near the Notre Dame Church and Arles’ highest natural elevation, is another Easel. It’s supposed to give the visitor a view of the open country that inspired so many of Van Gogh’s painting. But, the trees have grown up and the town has expanded and there isn’t much open space visible.
Van Gogh was drawn to Arles in 1888 by the sunlight of Provence. Though there are no Van Gogh museums in Arles, the Easel walks really brought his presence alive for us. This seemed especially true at the building that was once the hospital where Van Gogh was taken after cutting off his ear. Now called Espace Van Gogh, it is a square two story building with a large garden courtyard in the center. While there, he painted the garden. The tree has grown a bit in the last 128 years.
I think the reason we liked Arles better than Avignon had to do with more than that there were fewer tourists. The old town of Avignon, enclosed in its wall as it was, sometimes had the feeling of an amusement park, albeit a medieval amusement park. Arles was just Arles. And that was good enough.