My Marseille, by Jonathan Meades

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Francis Le Belgian, JoPle Le Turc, Philippe Le Dingue, Jacky Le Mat are, alas, no more with us. Tony L’Angille, after spending 28 of his 84 years in prison, retired in the back trees. THESE shrub – Mobi chiefs – they belonged, perhaps created, a mythical Marseille. Their less Picaresque descendants, Maghrebian teens were created with AK 47, do not share their ancestors’ taste for celebrities. However, they supply a hollow press with a copy filled with blood.

Housing projects in the northern neighborhoods of the city where today’s hoodlums live, then, only for specialists: demographers, sociologists, investigative documentaries, the right policeman. Wiser to start in the south where, missing Nostalgia of mudI choose to live. Marseille is an alarm alarming city, whose chaotic urbanism is determined by a severe topography and the struggle to oppose it. The whitewashed massifs around it constitute unforgivable gulves, harvesters, dry valleys and empty rocks like bad teeth. This layer cake of AEONS belongs to the sublime sphere than that of beauty.

Chapelle Saint-Joseph is a monument of banality. But the perfectly conical hill on which it stands can be a component of a picturesque artificial landscape – more rex whistler than Cézanne. Beyond a statement beyond the hat is a security castle, La Rouvière, an 8,000-inhabitious co-propoon that belongs not so much to architecture as for orthogonal geology. Here is always 1962, when a million black legs AND arrest Traded by Charles de Gaulle and sacrificed for the eager casters for Bloodththsy of the Algerian national frontalizing party left Algiers and Oran. This is where many of the black legs And the children of their children still live among them, with the permanent fear of the eternal antagonist. This fear is one of the many foundations of my new novel, Blank wig.

This Aeons layer cake belongs to the sphere of sublime

Marseille is a city of collisions than from ellielies. La Major, the striped cathedral, roughly Byzantine, seems to rise from the sea to a collision of elements. The incense and harmful cruise ships do not match one another. One of La Major’s architects, Espérandieu, was also responsible for Palais Longchamp and Notre-Dame de la Garde. The work is bold, quintessential Napoleon III – and exciting. It is routinely overlooked by today’s black architects and their pilgrim students watching Rapp in Le Corbusier’s Radieuse and-less honestly-in rebuilding Fernand Pouillon of the Vieux port in a way borrowed from fascist Italy. Le Grand Bleu (good headquarters named Bouches-Du-Rhône created by Will Alsop) is the only work of the last half century to match Le Corbusier.

Bouillabaisse is a proven word that translates approximately as “you have been”. The point of the dish is the fish soup, and the best fish soup is in the François Coquillages, which does not offer bouillabaisse. The true vernacular dish of the city is pizza. There are dozens of pizza vans and as many restaurants. Chez étienne and Chez Sauveur should not be missed.

Then it is time to treat roucas-bllan, the richest part of the city and, evenly, the least known. A maze of coniferous slopes and greasy valleys with white houses, cubes, outer outer stairs and winding alleys. Lanes with high walls culminate in full rocks. The last concrete of the 19th century imitates trees, writing, drawers and branches. There is a visible kin to the art of Facteur Cheval and Robert Tatin. However, this Rocaille is of Italian origin, as is much more in Marseille: cooking, dialect, vesspas. Roucas-Blanci is a place to get lost. It descends to the main coastal road, and Jules Cantini’s replica of Michelangelo’s Davidwhose face is emptied in some versions of Street View, apparently to save that shame after death.

The nearby beaches are far from the rocky beauty of the Calanks. Overwhelmed by a Ferris wheel, they are all ice cream, burgers and bold homage to America. A more genuine homage should be found at the Negrel Et Mistral, the only shop I know sells dsonut Knuckle. Even Maison Empereur just beyond the road does not sell them, a surprise because it sells everything else. It is small compared to Kadewe or Harrods, but its staggering strangeness is fascinating. A hardware store and ironymongers, it offers kitchen tools, latch, main weapon, artist smocks, working blue Clothes, things, tried this and paisley it. It is a temple for the art of living in France, that lasting fantasy of markets, full fruits and elders rich in wisdom-as described by writers including Elizabeth David, Terrence Conran and Peter Mayle. Much strangest from many of its strange departments is a hidden bed to rent. Comforting and household, yes. But also blocked and weak bad – a masking to stay low when you are on the run.

Empty wig by Jonathan Meades is published by Irregular by £ 15. His exhibition Jonathan Meades: Adieu Francis Le Belgian is in Collective Cité Radieuse From March 25