From Aix to Avignon direct is less than 50 miles, but the longer route through St. Rémy and Tarascon is well worth the extra 18 miles.
The first village is St. Cannat, where the remains of a castle of the Bishops of Marseilles can be seen, and also the pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Vie. The road then begins to go through an open country, broken up with a curious formation of rocky ridges, through which the road has been cut. The whole neighbourhood was badly shaken with an earthquake in 1909, and Lambesc and other villages suffered very severely.
Sénas is a small stone village without interest, but Orgon, the next place, is strikingly situated between a precipitous limestone ridge and the wide bed of the River Durance, spanned at this point with a huge lattice girder railway-bridge. On the summit of the ridge are the picturesque ruins of a château of the Counts of Provence, twice dismantled, and also the Chapel of Notre Dame de Beauregard. The town has preserved part of its ramparts and several picturesque houses of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The church dates from 1325.
Five kilometres north of Orgon the road to St. Rémy goes off to the left, and runs along the north side of the isolated group of hills called Les Alpines. Long rows of tall cypresses stand by the roadside in vast perspectives, and help to mitigate the fierce mistral when it comes shrieking over the desolate plains of the Rhone’s delta.
ST. RÉMY
is a pleasant town with tree-lined streets and a fourteenth-century tower to its church, which is modern. About a mile to the south, on the site of the Phœnician town of Glanum Livii, afterwards Romanized, stand two remarkably fine relics of the first four centuries of this era. One is a Roman triumphal arch, half destroyed above, but still retaining finely coffered work inside the arch and some sculptured figures outside; the other is a magnificently preserved mausoleum of three stories, 50 feet high, and built of the same orange-coloured sandstone as the arch. The base is adorned with bas-reliefs of battle and hunting scenes, and on the top is a peristyle of ten Corinthian columns, containing two statues (with modern heads) representing the parents of Sextus and Marius, of the family of the Julii, by whom it was erected. The situation of these remarkable structures on a rocky little plateau is most striking.
TARASCON
Keeping along the foot of Les Alpines for about 9 kilometres farther, one swings to the right to the interesting old town of Tarascon, which faces Beaucaire on the opposite side of the mud-coloured Rhone. A long suspension bridge joins the two towns.
The Church of Ste. Marthe, with its crocketed spire, was built on the site of a Roman temple in the twelfth century, and rebuilt between 1379 and 1449. It retains the magnificent south portal of the earlier church. The saint to whom the church is dedicated is said to have been buried under the marble effigy one may see. A legend tells how St. Martha found the district ravaged by a hideous dragon, which she killed or tamed, and thus earned the gratitude of the people of Tarascon. The memory of this deliverance was kept alive until recent years by a fête held on the second Sunday after Pentecost, when a huge representation of the dragon was taken through the streets. The castle of Tarascon is a complete and most imposing pile, standing four square, with one side washed by the Rhone. It was begun by Louis II. of Provence in the fourteenth century, and finished by the good King Réné of Anjou. Being now used as a prison, it is not easy to obtain permission to enter. The town still preserves a good gateway, flanked by round towers, and some of the old streets are picturesquely arcaded.
Beaucaire is a rather squalid little town, and it is far better to look from the Tarascon side at the fine ruined castle of Montmorency standing on its mass of white rock.