The Pont du Gard carries no road and no water now, and it is still one of the most astonishing things the Romans left behind — three tiers of arches in honey-gold stone, fifty metres above the Gardon, built in the first century to step an aqueduct across the valley on its fifty-kilometre run to Nîmes.
I. The bridge over the Gardon
It was raised without mortar, the blocks cut so true they have held for two thousand years; some still carry the masons’ marks and the jutting stones left for the scaffolding. Come early or late and walk both banks — the scale only lands when a person crosses beneath the lowest arch and shrinks to nothing. In summer the river below is for swimming.
“Two thousand years, no mortar, and not a stone has moved.”
II. Nîmes, the most Roman city in France
The water ran to Nîmes, ancient Nemausus, which keeps more of Rome than any city in France. The Arènes, an amphitheatre of the first century, is among the best preserved anywhere and still fills for events; the Maison Carrée, a near-perfect temple, stands in the middle of town as it has for two millennia, now faced by a modern gallery across the square.
III. Gardens, denim and the road on
Behind the temple, the Jardins de la Fontaine were laid out in the eighteenth century around the Roman spring, climbing to the Tour Magne for the view over the rooftops. Nîmes also gave the world a word it never asks for credit on: the sturdy cloth serge de Nîmes — denim. From here the Languedoc opens west, toward the coast and the canal.
