Marseille: You Heard It Here First!

With all this sublime, abstract, and decidedly modern art and architecture, forgetting your location would be easy.  Are you in Berlin? New York? Barcelona? Tokyo? Basel?  No, no, no, no and no.

I don't know what Marseille was like in the '50s or the '70s or the '90s.  I don't know what Marseille was like when Jason Bourne washed up on its shores in 2002's The Bourne Identity.  (Yes, it was that long ago.)   But I can tell you that it is now a visual feast.  Matt and I arrived in Marseille early this afternoon, and we spent a good part of the day exploring the port, a series of art installations, some galleries, and other cultural venues.  (They are not really museums — they are not that stuffy or formal.) While everyone describes France's second largest city as a gritty, shabby, and vaguely dangerous port town, that's not what we saw.  Marseille is sparkling.

I'm sure part of the luster is due to Marseille's designation as one of Europe's two Cultural Capitals of 2013.  But this rebranding must have been going on for a little longer.  There's no way such dazzle could take hold overnight.  However long it has taken, Marseille is obviously enjoying a renaissance. We enjoyed it too on this crystal clear mid-70s bright sunny day.  Here's a taste: