Montpellier's city centre – the old town – is small, compact, architecturally homogeneous, full of charm and teeming with life, except in July and August when the students are on holiday and everyone else is at the beach. And the place is almost entirely pedestrianized, so you can walk the narrow streets without looking anxiously over your shoulder.At the hub of the city's life, joining the old part to its newer accretions, is place de la Comédie, or "L'Oeuf" to the initiated. This colossal, oblong square, paved with cream-coloured marble, has a fountain at its centre and cafés either side. One end is closed by the Opéra, an ornate nineteenth-century theatre; the other opens onto the Esplanade, a beautiful tree-lined promenade which ends in the Corum concert hall, dug into the hillside and topped off in pink granite, with splendid views from the roof. The city's most trumpeted museum, the Musée Fabre, has closed for long-term renovation. Visitors will have to wait until 2006 to view its large and historically important collection of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Flemish and English painting, including works by Delacroix, Raphael, Jan van Steen and Veronese. From the north side of L'Oeuf, rue de la Loge and rue Foch, opened in the 1880s in Montpellier's own Haussmann-izing spree, slice through the heart of the old city. Either side of them, a maze of narrow lanes slopes away to the encircling modern boulevards. Few buildings survive from before the 1622 siege, but the city's busy bourgeoisie quickly made up for the loss, proclaiming their financial power in lots of austere seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions. Known as "Lou Clapas" (rubble), the area is rapidly being restored and gentrified. It's a pleasure to wander through and come upon the secretive little squares like place St-Roch, place St-Ravy and place de la Canourgue. First left off rue de la Loge is Grande-Rue Jean-Moulin, where Moulin, hero of the Resistance, lived at no. 21. To the left, at no. 32, the present-day Chamber of Commerce is located in one of the finest eighteenth-century hôtels, the Hôtel St-Côme, originally built as a demonstration operating theatre for medical students. On the opposite corner, rue de l'Argenterie forks up to place Jean-Jaurès. This square is a nodal point in the city's student life: on fine evenings between 6pm and 7pm you get the impression that the half of the population not in place de la Comédie is sitting here and in the adjacent place du Marché-aux-Fleurs. Through the Gothic doorway of no. 10 of place Jean-Jaurès, is the so-called palace of the kings of Aragon, who ruled Montpellier for a stretch in the thirteenth century. Close by is the Halles Castellane, a graceful, iron-framed market hall. A short walk from place Jean-Jaurès, the Hôtel de Varenne, on place Pétrarque, houses two local history museums of somewhat specialized interest, the Musée de Vieux Montpellier (Tues–Sat 9.30am–noon & 1.30–5pm; free), concentrating on the city's history, and the more interesting, private Musée Fougau on the top floor (Wed & Thurs 3–6.30pm; free), dealing with the folk history of Languedoc and things Occitan. Off to the right, the lively little rue des Trésoriers-de-France has one of the best seventeenth-century houses in the city, the Hôtel Lunaret, at no. 5, while round the block on rue Jacques Coeur you'll find the Musée Languedocien (July–Sept Mon–Sat 2–6pm; Oct–June Mon–Sat 2–5pm; €5), which houses a very mixed collection of Greek, Egyptian and other antiquities. On the hill at the end of rue Foch, from which the royal artillery bombarded the Protestants in 1622, the formal gardens of the Promenade du Peyrou look out across the city and away to the Pic St-Loup, which dominates the hinterland behind Montpellier, with the distant smudge of the Cévennes beyond. At the farther end a swagged and pillared water tower marks the end of an eighteenth-century aqueduct modelled on the Pont du Gard. Beneath the grand sweep of its double tier of arches is a daily fruit and veg market and a huge Saturday flea market. At the city end of the promenade, a vainglorious triumphal arch shows Louis XIV-Hercules stomping on the Austrian eagle and the English lion, tactlessly reminding the locals of his victory over their Protestant "heresy". Lower down the hill, on boulevard Henri-IV, the lovely but slightly run-down Jardin des Plantes (July & Aug Mon–Sat 8.30am–noon & 2–6pm; rest of year Mon–Sat 10am–5pm; free), with avenues of exotic trees, was founded in 1593 and is France's oldest botanical garden. Across the road is the long-suffering cathedral, with its massive porch, sporting a patchwork of styles from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Inside is a memorial to the bishop of Montpellier who sided with the half-million destitute vine-growers who came to demonstrate against their plight in 1907 and were fired on by government troops for their pains. Above the cathedral, in the university's prestigious medical school on rue de l'école-de-Médecine, the Musée Atger (Mon, Wed & Thurs 1.30–5.45pm; free) has a distinguished academic collection of French and Italian drawings, while the macabre Musée d'Anatomie (daily 2.30–5pm; free) displays all sorts of revolting things in bottles. Close by is the pretty little place de la Canourgue, and, beyond, down rue d'Aigrefeuille, the old university quarter, with some good bookshops on rue de l'Université. South of place de la Comédie stretches the controversial quarter of Antigone, a chain of postmodern squares and open spaces designed to provide a mix of fair-rent housing and offices, aligned along a monumental axis from the place du Nombre-d'Or, through place du Millénaire, to the glassed-in arch of the Hôtel de la Région. It's more interesting in scale and design than most attempts at urban renewal, but it has failed to attract the crowds away from the place de la Comédie and is often deserted. The enclosed spaces in particular work well, with their theatrical references to classical architecture, like oversized cornices and columns supporting only sky. The more open spaces are, however, disturbing, with something totalitarian and inhuman about their scale and blandness.
|
