Saint-Rémy sits at the northern foot of the Alpilles, a round old town wrapped in plane-shaded boulevards, with one of the best Wednesday markets in Provence. It is the birthplace of Nostradamus — but the names that draw most visitors are a Dutch painter and a buried Roman town just south of the walls.
I. The old town and its market
Inside the ring boulevards, the old town is a knot of lanes, fountains and Renaissance hôtels particuliers, several now small museums and galleries. On Wednesday the whole centre fills with stalls — olives, melons, linen, the produce of the Alpilles — in what is, for many, the model of the Provençal market morning.
“He painted the olive trees and the night sky here, in the last good year of his life.”
II. Van Gogh at Saint-Paul
Just south of town, the monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole was the asylum where Vincent van Gogh spent a year from 1889, and in it painted with extraordinary force — the irises, the olive trees, the cypresses, and the rolling night that became The Starry Night. His room and the walled garden are open; the fields he painted still surround them.
III. Glanum, the buried city
Beside the monastery stand Les Antiques — a triumphal arch and a mausoleum, the best-preserved Roman monuments of their kind in France — and behind them the excavated city of Glanum, a Greco-Roman town with its forum, temples and spring laid open in the valley. Few places gather two thousand years and a painter’s eye in so small a walk.
