Page 161 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - Provence & The Côte d'Azur

PROVENCE AREA B Y AREA  159

VAUCLUSE

Vaucluse is a land of vines and lavender, truffles and melons,
which many know about through the books of the English
expatriate and author Peter Mayle. His works depict village
life in the Luberon, an idyllic countryside where Picasso
spent his last years. Roussillon, set among ochre quarries,
also became the topic of a book, when American sociologist
Laurence Wylie experienced village life there in the 1950s.

The jewel of Vaucluse is the fortified civilizations. Carpentras was also a
riverside city of Avignon, home to the Roman town, but its claim to fame is its
popes during their “Babylonian exile” from possession of France’s oldest synagogue.
1309–77, and now host to one of the great The story of the Jews, who were given
music and theatre festivals of France. The papal protection in Vaucluse, is one of
popes’ castle at Châteauneuf-du-Pape is many religious histories which can be
now a ruin, but the village still produces traced through the region. Another is the
stupendous wines. The Rhône valley wine Baron of Oppède’s brutal crusade against
region is justly renowned, and its vineyards the Vaudois heretics in 1545, when many
spread as far northeast as the slopes of the villages were destroyed.
towering giant of Provence, Mont Ventoux. Near Oppède, at Lacoste, a path leads
The Roman legacy in Vaucluse is also to the château of France’s notorious
remarkable. It is glimpsed in the great libertine Marquis de Sade. Perhaps a more
theatre and triumphal arch in Orange, elevated writer was Petrarch, who lived in
and in the ruins of Vaison-la-Romaine Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, where the Sorgue
which were not built over by successive river emerges from a mysterious source.

A vine-covered house at Le Bastidon, near the Luberon
Lavender fields in glorious bloom outside the 12th-century Abbaye de Sénanque