Marseille

Basic facts :
The most populated city in France after Paris, Marseille has, like the capital, prospered and been ransacked over the centuries. It has suffered plagues, religious bigotry, republican and royalist terror and had its own Commune and Bastille storming. It was the presence of so many Marseillaise revolutionaries  marching to Paris in 1792 that gave the name to the national anthem. Nowadays Marseille has every social, economic and political conflict of the country: it is a violent place and racism is rife, as is corruption and other lawlessness. Certainly it is not a glamorous city and you might not choose to live there, but it's a wonderful place to visit - a real port with a trading history going back over 2500 years. It's as cosmopolitan as Paris, with the advantages of being nearly 800km further south, with more down-to-earth, informal inhabitants and none of the tourist trappings of the rest of this coast.

Marseille is divided into arrondissements, sixteen in all, which spiral out from the focal point of the city, the Vieux Port - a good place to indulge in the sedentary pleasures of observing the city's street life. Two fortresses guard the entrance to the harbour, a little way south of which is the Basilique St-Victor, the city's oldest church. It looks and feels like a fortress - the walls of the choir are almost 3m thick - and for a small fee you can visit the crypt and catacombs (daily 8am-6pm; F10). Saint Victor himself, a Roman soldier, was slowly ground to death between two millstones. On the other, northern, side of the harbour is the former old town of Marseille, known as Le Panier, a densely populated area that was dynamited by the Nazis, who deported around 20,000 people from here. Nowadays it's a mainly Algerian quarter, especially over towards the train station, but it's fast being gentrified. After the war, archeologists reaped the benefits of the destruction by finding remains of the Roman docks equipped with vast storage jars for foodstuffs, which can be seen in situ at the Musée des Docks Romains on place Vivaux (Tues-Sun: summer 11am-6pm; winter 10am-5pm; F10). The new Musée d'Art Contemporain, nearby at 69 bd de Haifa (Tues-Sun: summer 11am-6pm; winter 10am-5pm; F15), boasts a strong collection, including works by Warhol, Christo and Buren.

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The only other thing to see while in Marseille is the Château d'If, the evil island fortress that figured in Dumas' great adventure story, The Count of Monte Cristo. No one ever escaped from here; most prisoners, incarcerated for political or religious reasons, went insane or died (usually both) before reaching the end of their sentences. Boats leave for the island roughly every two hours, on the hour, from the quai des Belges. The journey takes twenty minutes and costs F50.

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