My first day, I headed for the Arènes, or Roman amphitheater, one of the three major Roman sites in the city. Nîmes was Nemausus in Roman times, a very important city in southern France on the Via Domitia, a road that connected Rome to Spain. The amphitheater here was built in the first century and used for gladiator battles, etc. But after that it went through centuries of other uses such as a fortress for the Visigoth invaders and even a small walled town in the Middle Ages until the 18th century. In the middle of the 19th, a restoration was undertaken, and it's evident in some parts just how "restored" it was with stone and brick that resembled very little the original structure. Today, the arena is used for bullfights which were happening the week after I was there, and I wondered if they left the wooden bleachers up all year round or just for the season.
I also walked around the city quite a bit, passing this ridiculously-named clothing store. I don't think I'd want to shop here.
Nîmes also boasts an incredibly beautiful park on a site where the Romans had some major public buildings and a temple to the goddess Diana. The park's major feature is a fountain and series of canals and ponds fed by the powerful spring that was one impetus for Roman settlement.
On the same subject of Roman water, I took a bus the next day to the Pont du Gard, the Roman aqueduct over the river Gard that was part of a system to bring water from Uzès to Nîmes, about 25 km. The structure is amazing, rising almost 50m from the riverbed with three levels of arches of differing sizes. I was able to see the aqueduct from a few different veiwpoints since there are trails all around and a second bridge that has been built running right next to the Roman construction.
One of the trails was particularly great because you could see the continuation of the aqueduct as it ran off into the forest. Parts were overgrown and falling down, while others looked quite intact. And still others had had the arches filled in at some later point, perhaps by opportunist folks looking to build a wall in the area and taking advantage of the existing structure.
Back in Nîmes the next day, I wandered more, stumbling across the place in the city where water came in from the aqueduct and was separated into different flows to areas of the city. And I went to the city archeological musem which was quite the place. It felt like a somewhat dinky municipal museum in the U.S. where you might find things that have been sitting around attics for years, but things like old polictical propaganda or furniture or clothing, not Roman artifacts. Somehow the lack of interpretation and jumble of set up is more shocking when the objects are that old. Perhaps it's not just age that imbues things with importance and these Roman stones and pottery were not so valuable. But seeing thousands of years old statues, mosaics and carvings in a courtyard with lots of pigeons and bird poop was pretty startling.
And then after my last night of sleeping with a loud, snoring Australian in my room, it was off to Avignon to meet up with Tim!
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