Fotografi a Nîmes e il Pont du Gard

Nîmes has more standing Roman architecture than any other city in France, and it is all within a twenty-minute walk. The amphitheatre, built around 70 AD, is the best-preserved arena in the Roman world — two storeys of sixty arches all the way round, still in use for concerts and for the Pentecost féria, and ticketed for entry. Four hundred metres away the Maison Carrée is a complete Roman temple: columns, podium, pediment, nothing missing, added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023 and standing across a bare square from Norman Foster's glass Carré d'Art, which makes the one frame in town that puts two thousand years in the same picture. West of the centre the Jardins de la Fontaine climb the hill from the Roman spring: eighteenth-century balustrades and stone staircases, the ruin called the Temple de Diane at the bottom, and above them the Tour Magne, a Roman tower on the summit with a view over the whole city and the garrigue behind it. The reason most visitors come, though, is twenty-five kilometres north-east. The Pont du Gard carried the aqueduct of Nîmes across the Gardon in the first century AD — forty-nine metres high, three tiers of arches, honey-coloured stone standing in a green river gorge, and no scaffolding, ruin or restoration to explain away. It is a paid site with a single parking charge per vehicle, the banks below are a public river beach in summer, and the light on the stone is at its best in the last two hours of the day. Time the visit for spring or autumn: July and August here run past thirty-five degrees, and the mistral can make a session in the gardens hard work.