Tour Audio a Arles

Arles has been important for so long that its layers of significance have compressed into something almost overwhelming. The Romans took it in 123 BC and eventually made it the seat of the Praetorian Prefecture governing the entire western empire. The amphitheatre they built still hosts bullfights. The Church of St Trophime, where Crusader armies were blessed before departing, has a cloister of such severe Romanesque beauty that it stops people mid-sentence. All of this is UNESCO World Heritage, and all of it is also simply part of Tuesday in Arles.

Then Vincent van Gogh arrived from Paris in February 1888 and produced more than 300 paintings and drawings before his mental breakdown and self-mutilation in December of the same year.

The Yellow House where he lived no longer stands, destroyed in a 1944 bombing, but the Cafe de la Nuit on the Place du Forum is still there, and the view from the Rhone bank that appears in Starry Night Over the Rhone is still recognizable. The International Photography Festival, running every summer since 1970, has made Arles a different kind of art capital. The Camargue wetlands, the largest in France, begin at Arles's southern edge, and in the right light the flamingos visible from the city limits feel continuous with everything Van Gogh was painting when he couldn't stop.