Fun in France and a big win for Italy

After our week at scout camp in Naples we went to France to visit John's sister, Emily.  She lives in Privas, a village about half way between Lyon and the Southern coast near the Ardeche mountains.  It sits on the butter olive oil line, a perfect place to be.  North of the line butter is more common, south of the line olive oil dominates.  Rome is solidly in the olive oil country which means that the lovely pastries are not as lovely as they are in France.  I hate to complain about the food in a country known for great food, but the bread isn't salted and the pastries are pretty bland with a few exceptions.  France definitely does it better.  We flew into Marseille and picked up our car.  Our first stop was a bakery just outside of the airport.  We filled ourselves with baguettes and berry tarts.  It was heavenly.

 

The drive from Marseille to Valance was beautiful.  I'd love to go back and explore the towns I've heard John and his family talking about for years.  It is really a lovely part of the world.

After a day of travel, the kids just wanted to chill in the hotel room so John and I went out to explore the town.  Valance is lovely.  There is a lively square downtown that was filled with restaurant tables.  We stopped for dessert of course and to take pictures of the cathedral.  They say it is Romanesque, but other than some bell towers, there doesn't seem to be much medieval Romanesque left in Rome.  So much got remodeled later into the more elaborate Baroque style.  There are probably more in the outlying towns that weren't in the redecorating line of fire.  There are actually a lot of Romanesque bell towers when you start to notice them behind and around the Baroque facades.   Romanesque is different from the later gothic style in a few noticable ways.  Romanesque arches are round instead of pointed and the overall style is simpler and more solid.  The gothic flying buttresses, sharply pointed towers, and gargoyles came later, but the capitols on the columns are definitely different from the Roman columns and you can see that they are an intermediary step between the Roman and the Gothic.

The next day we drove into the hills to Privas, where John's sister lives.  It is a pretty town in the Ardeche with a medieval center.  Much of it has been rebuilt over the years, but it still retains its charm.  E's lives in a small town house in the medieval center with three rooms stacked on top of each other.  You have to step down into the kitchen in what is now the ground floor.  The living area is on the floor above and the bedroom is on top.  The bathroom fixtures are oddly split between all three levels.  It's an old building that definitely wasn't designed with plumbing in mind. The first floor balcony off the living area is just above your head when you stand on the street.  Many buildings from this era have a level or two below the current ground floor.  When the streets filled with rubble in the 1600s they didn't clear it out.  They just moved the doors up or cut new ones to the new street level, or not.  You can still see partial doors in some of the old houses.

Privas is not on the list of typical tourist spots, although it is quite popular with Belgian tourists who might have family connections in the area or people who are attracted to the area by the forests and rivers.  E explained that Belgium is cloudy and flat and Privas is warm and hilly so it is the perfect location for a summer change of scenery.

The area has been inhabited for a long time.  The name is possibly derived from an old gallic word for the bridges that crossed the ravines bordering the town.  A Roman villa from the imperial era has been excavated nearby, but it seems that the village really became a center in the medieval period.  The city was important enough that it warranted building walls in the 13th century.  In the 16th century it was a center of the protestant reformation.  During the Huguenot rebellions in the 1620s the city was besieged by the Catholic royalists and destroyed, filling the streets with rubble.  You can see a change in the stonework on the buildings that were only partly destroyed and rebuilt.  For years what was left of the town was empty.  The surviving Protestant inhabitants fled to Switzerland, England, or the surrounding hills.

The hills nearby are filled with limestone caves that have been inhabited off and on since prehistoric times.  During and after the time of the siege, Protestants moved out of the city and into the caves, constructing stone walls with doors and windows to close off the caves, walls outside to fortify the entrances, and fireplaces and other living spaces inside.

Bridge between Privas and Lyas

Privas has deep gorges on two sides with bridges crossing over to the neighboring villages.  The current bridge is at town level, but an earlier bridge is much further down near the river.  We walked down into the gorge and saw ruins of the mills that used to run on the water power of the river.

Just outside of town is a swimming hole.  It is a beautiful spot and a lot of fun on a hot day.  There is a little dam with deepish water on the downstream side.  Just deep enough for jumping.  Up stream is was waist dep in places, but not swimming depth.  Just enough to play in the water.  A perfectly relaxing afternoon.  It isn't easy to find a place to swim in Rome and it is a bit tricky to get to the beach without a car so we don't get to swim as much as we do in California.  I miss it when the weather is warm.

On our last day we sent the kids to the bakery to get our daily baguette and tarts.  They called back and said there was a parade going through the town.  This was a surprise in such a small village, but yup there was a parade, complete with marching band playing Seven Nation Army.  It was a parade of the confrerie or guilds.  The confrerie are guilds for the producers of different agricultural products in the region and other things like saints.  So there were guilds for the growers of olives and chestnuts, the makers of goat cheese and wine, and truffle gatherers.  The parade ended with speeches in the main square where the Rotary club was sponsoring a food festival fund raiser.  The whole thing was so fun to see.  I wondered how long there have been chestnuts guilds and cheese guilds in town.  Perhaps a very long time.

We flew out of Lyon and arrived in Rome during the Euro cup semi finals.  Italy was playing and the whole city was watching.  We could hear the cheers and the groans from the open windows as we walked home from the metro stop.  After an eruption of swearing from the windows My Girl checked her phone.  Italia got a yellow card.  They ended up winning the game and advancing to the finals.  The city was excited.  During the game everyone was watching.  Screens were set up in sidewalk cafes and restaurants.  The collective reactions were fun to hear.  When Italy scored during the penalty shootout at the end of the game the cheering was loud enough that it registered as an earthquake.  After a rough year it was good to have something to celebrate.  After the game the streets were flooded with people waving flags, honking horns, and cheering.  We walked up to the San Giovanni the center of celebration in our neighborhood.  It was a party and a fantastic way to celebrate summer.  Avanti Azuri!