SAINT-REMY-DE-PROVENCE. – Town
at the foot of the Alpilles in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of France. It is situated north of ancient Glanon of the Gallic period, Glanum of the Roman age.
Since 1921, excavations carried out under the direction of the Monuments historiques have brought to light three periods of the ancient city: the first, preceding 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 Marseille (49 B.C.); the third, lasting until the destruction of Glanum by the Germanic invasion around A.D. 270 (municipal arch, monumental gate of Glanum, mausoleum of the Julii, remarkably well preserved, baths, houses, statues). After the destruction of Glanum, the inhabitants moved northward onto the plain, to the site occupied
by present-day St-R.-de-P., where a baptistery dating from the fifth or sixth century was recently discovered near the present chapel of St Peter, built over an earlier Romanesque, and subsequently Gothic, chapel. The town’s present name derives from the fact that the Merovingian kings donated the territory to the abbey of St-R. of Reims, and the settlement consequently took the name « Villa Sancti Remigii ». From the ninth to the fourteenth century, however, the place was divided between two Benedictine abbeys: that of St-R. of Reims and the other, St-Pierre de Montmajour. At the end of the tenth century, mention is made of a rural chapel dedicated to St Andrew and St Paul, where in 1080 a monastery called St-Paul-de-Mausole was founded, because of its proximity to the mausoleum of the Julii. It was initially inhabited by canons headed by a provost and dependent on the cathedral chapter of Avignon, which in 1695 ceded it to the religious of the Observance of St Francis in the province of St Louis. The monastery was suppressed in 1791 by the French Revolution; and since the middle of the nineteenth century it has served as an asylum for the mentally ill (the painter van Gogh stayed there in 1890). The church has an eighteenth-century façade, but its interior preserves the Provençal Romanesque architecture of the twelfth century, with later additions. The cloister dates partly from the end of the twelfth century and partly from the beginning of the thirteenth, with capitals bearing centaurs, chimeras, etc.