Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

SAINT-RÉMY-DE-PROVENCE. - A small town at the foot of the Alpilles in the Bouches-du-Rhône department in France. It is situated north of ancient Glanon of the Gallic period, Glanum of the Roman age.

Since 1921 the explorations carried out by the direction of the Monuments historiques have brought to light three periods of the ancient city; the first earlier than the Roman conquest, with a temple and Hellenistic houses; the second from the first Roman occupation in the time of Marius (102 B.C.) to the conquest of Marseilles (49 B.C.); the third down to the destruction of Glanum by the Germanic invasion around 270 A.D. (municipal arch, monumental gate of Glanum, mausoleum of the Julii, in a state of admirable preservation, baths, houses, statues). After the destruction of Glanum the inhabitants moved northward into the plain, to the place occupied by the present-day St-R.-de-P., where a baptistery of the 5th or 6th century has recently been discovered near the present-day chapel of St. Peter, built over a chapel that was first Romanesque, then Gothic. The present name of the small town derives from the fact that the Merovingian kings donated the territory to the abbey of St-R. of Reims, and therefore the settlement took the name of "Villa Sancti Remigii". From the 9th to the 14th century, however, the place was divided between two Benedictine abbeys: that of St-R. of Reims and that of St-Pierre de Montmajour. At the end of the 10th century there is mention of a rural chapel called that of St. Andrew and St. Paul, where in 1080 a monastery arose called St-Paul-de-Mausole, because of its proximity to the mausoleum of the Julii, inhabited first by canons headed by a provost, dependent on the cathedral Chapter of Avignon, which in 1695 ceded it to the religious of the Observance of St. Francis of the province of St. Louis. The monastery was suppressed in 1791 by the French Revolution; and since the middle of the 19th century it has been an asylum for mental illnesses (the painter van Gogh stayed there in 1890). The church has a facade of the 18th century but inside preserves the Provençal Romanesque architecture of the 12th century with later additions. The cloister is partly of the end of the 12th century, partly of the beginning of the 13th century, with capitals featuring centaurs, chimeras, etc.

Enrico Josi