Once a Roman colony, Nîmes, France, has some of the most pristine monuments in Europe — and newer signs of life as well.
WATCHING STARLINGS STREAK through the arches of the bone-white stone amphitheatre in Nîmes, you might forget you’re in the South of France and not Rome. The Colosseum look-alike dates to the end of the first century A.D., when Emperor Augustus named this Celtic settlement on the road linking Italy to Spain a Roman colony. Today, Nîmes is more commonly described as sitting between Avignon and Montpellier, and while the Roman soldiers have been replaced with French Foreign Legionnaires, this city of 155,000 is more a charming travel destination than a seat of power.
Visitors come to Nîmes for its unusually well-preserved monuments — and for newer feats of architecture. Thanks to a push begun in 1984 by then mayor Jean Bousquet, it now has Sir Norman Foster’s 1993 Carré d’Art, a modern art museum with slender pillars that mimic those of the Maison Carrée, the Roman temple across the street, but whose façade is all glass and aluminum; Jean Nouvel’s 1987 Nemausus public housing project, a pair of shiplike buildings with cantilevered balconies; and the just-opened Musée de la Romanité, a new home for the city’s collection of ancient and medieval art and artefacts, with a façade of nearly 7,000 silk-screened glass tiles that appears to ripple in the light — as if the museum is wearing a toga, its architect, Elizabeth de Portzamparc, has said.
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