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Marseille was founded around 600 BC by Greek settlers from Phocaea, making it the oldest city in France by almost 600 years. The settlement they called Massalia grew into an independent republic that resisted Roman authority until Julius Caesar besieged it in 49 BC. The national anthem La Marseillaise was written in Strasbourg in 1792, but it was named after Marseille because the volunteers who marched from the city to Paris singing it became the song's most visible advocates. This is the kind of history Marseille notices and keeps. The city maintains what it calls its own culture with a pride that Paris tends to find slightly excessive, which is more or less the point.

The city's position on the Mediterranean coast between the Rhone delta and the limestone calanques has shaped everything.

The Old Port (Vieux Port), where Greek ships first anchored, remains the functional and symbolic heart of the city: fishing boats still unload early morning catches on the north quay while the south quay fills with pleasure craft. Notre-Dame de la Garde basilica, the Bonne Mere (Good Mother), watches over the port from 149 meters above sea level, her gilded Byzantine Madonna visible from approaching vessels. The Canebiere boulevard runs east from the port, and the neighborhoods branching off it are some of the most genuinely mixed in France. The surrounding mountains and the geography of the coast, which urban geographers note prevents the ethnic segregation that defines Paris's banlieues, have kept Marseille's diverse communities in the same streets.