
The bridge was built in 1868 to allow trains of the PLM company [Paris-Lyon Marseille] to link Arles to Lunel cross the Rhone river, which is already quite wide at this point. This line in particular was dedicated to dispatch the coal produced in the Cevennes mountains. The bridge was destroyed on the 6th of August 1944, during a bombing. All that remains of the bridge are its pillars and imposing sculptured lions. The lion sculptures are the work of Pierre Louis Rouillard.
The pillars remain standing
Van Gogh's Trinquetaille Bridge 1888, since replaced after being bombed during the war- note the tree in both. In June of 1987, this painting sold for $20.2 million making it the second highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. Living
in Arles, he was at the height of his career, producing some of his
best work: sunflowers, fields, farmhouses and people of the Arles, Nîmes
and Avignon areas. It was a prolific time for Van Gogh: in less than
fifteen months he had created about 100 drawings, produced more than 200
paintings and wrote more than 200 letters. The canals, drawbridges,
windmills, thatched cottages and expansive fields of the Arles
countryside reminded Van Gogh of his life in the Netherlands. Arles
brought him the solace and bright sun that he sought for himself and
conditions to explore painting with more vivid colours, intense colour
contrasts and varied brushstrokes. He also returned to the roots of his
artistic training from the Netherlands, most notably with the use of a
reed pen for his drawings.
In front of the Langlois Bridge at Arles, the subject of four oil paintings, one watercolour and four drawings by Vincent van Gogh. The works, made in 1888 when Van Gogh lived in Arles, represent a melding of formal and creative aspects. Van Gogh used a perspective frame that he built and used in The Hague to create precise lines and angles when portraying perspective.Van Gogh was influenced by Japanese woodcut prints, as evidenced by his simplified use of colour to create a harmonious and unified image. Contrasting colours, such as blue and yellow, were used to bring a vibrancy to the works. He painted with an impasto, or thickly applied paint, using colour to depict the reflection of light. The subject matter, a drawbridge on a canal, reminded him of his homeland in the Netherlands. He asked his brother Theo to frame and send one of the paintings to an art dealer in the Netherlands. The reconstructed Langlois Bridge is now named Pont Van-Gogh.
Van Gogh had been 35 when he made the Langlois Bridge paintings and drawings. The Langlois Bridge was one of the crossings over the Arles to Bouc canal. It was built in the first half of the 19th century to expand the network of canals to the Mediterranean Sea. Locks and bridges were built, too, to manage water and road traffic. 

Just
outside Arles, the first bridge was the officially titled "Pont de
Réginel" but better known by the keeper's name as "Pont de Langlois". In
1930, the original drawbridge was replaced by a reinforced concrete
structure which, in 1944, was blown up by the retreating Germans who
destroyed all the other bridges along the canal except for the one at
Fos-sur-Mer, a port on the Mediterranean Sea. The Fos Bridge was
dismantled in 1959 with a view to relocating it on the site of the
Langlois Bridge but as a result of structural difficulties, it was
finally reassembled at Montcalde Lock several kilometres away from the
original site. According to letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh began a
study of women washing clothes near the Langlois Bridge about mid-March
1888 and was working on another painting of the bridge about April 2.
This was the first of several versions he painted of the Langlois Bridge
that crossed the Arles canal. Reflecting on Van Gogh's works of the Langlois Bridge Debora Silverman, author of the book Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art comments, "Van Gogh's depictions of the bridge have been considered a quaint exercise in nostalgia mingled with Japonist allusions." Van Gogh
approached the making of the paintings and drawings about the bridge in
a "serious and sustained manner" with attention to "the structure,
function, and component parts of this craft mechanism in the landscape."
The Maison Jaune,
also the subject of Van Gogh, didn't survive the bombing and no longer
exists. The place without the house looks almost the same. Although Van
Gogh's building is gone a placard on the scene commemorates its former
existence.
Marshal
Petain and Admiral Darlan in front of the Town Hall with Petain's
portrait on the façade when France was fighting the British and
Americans in North Africa. By 1945 they had switched sides and Petain
had been replaced with the portraits of Churchill, FDR, Stalin and,
protecting national sensibilities, de Gaulle.
Petain's image displayed at the amphitheatre. The central photograph shows German officers in 1944.
At the Barbegal aqueduct and mill, a Roman watermill complex located near Arles, described as "the greatest known concentration of mechanical power in the ancient world." It was built to supply drinking water from the mountain chain of the Alpilles to Arles (then called Arelate) on the Rhône River. Within ten miles north of Arles at Barbegal, near Fontvieille, where the aqueduct arrived at a steep hill, the aqueduct fed two parallel sets of eight water wheels to power a flourmill. There are two aqueducts which join just north of the mill complex, and a sluice which enabled the operators to control the water supply to the complex. The mill consisted of 16 waterwheels in two separate descending rows built into a steep hillside. There are substantial masonry remains of the water channels and foundations of the individual mills, together with a staircase rising up the hill upon which the mills are built. The mills apparently operated from the end of the 1st century until about the end of the 3rd century.
Father and son's photo of mom between arches
Chapel of Saint-Gabriel de Tarascon




The chapel was built in the 12th century, and is decorated with biblical scenes including above the door Adam and Eve and the snake curling around the tree of knowledge of good and evil, along with Daniel with lions. It was added in the very first list of Historic Monuments of France in 1840. The Church has suffered numerous kinds of violence passing the centuries, including bombing by the Allies during the Second World War.
Orange




101 years apart
In the museum across the street
Nîmes



Before and after its restoration

A large door (6.87 metres high by 3.27 metres wide) leads to the surprisingly
small and windowless interior, where the shrine was originally housed.
This is now used to house a tourist-oriented film on a the Roman history
of Nîmes.
Germans marching past the former theatre which was destroyed by fire in 1952. Only its remarkable ionic colonnade was preserved and relocated to the Caissargues rest area on the A54 between Nîmes and Arles.



The so-called Temple of Diana, likely 1897 or else late 19th century. Its atmospheric ruins probably date from the Antonine period in the 2nd Century. It is not clear what the real purpose of this building was, but it was probably not a temple. It's been suggested that it might have been an Imperial cult centre or even a library.


Frenchmen enthusiastically saluting the occupying Germans in front


German soldiers in the Nymphaeum
A crocodile chained to a palm tree with the inscription COL NEM, for
Colonia Nemausus, (the colony of Nemausus, the
local Celtic god of the Volcae Arecomici) can be seen all over the city, from elegant representations on the balcony of the town hall to more prosaic examples on the cast iron manhole covers scattered along the old winding streets of the town centre. According to one plausible theory the origins of this emblem may go back more than 2,000 years to September 31 BCE when the fleet of Octavian, nephew of Julius Caesar and future emperor, defeated that of Mark Antony and Cleopatra in the naval battle at Actium. By the time of the Battle of Actium, Mark Antony was based in Egypt. He was personally and politically united with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra who was present at the Battle, and they both fled back to Egypt after their defeat. Consequently the victory at Actium would have been viewed as the defeat of Egypt, not just the defeat of Mark Antony himself, a point Augustus stressed regularly not least in the erection and dedication of Egyptian obelisks in Rome. This victory, and Antony's subsequent suicide in Egypt in 30 BCE, left
Octavian in undisputed control of Rome and all its territories. The crocodile was frequently used to represent Egypt and a chained crocodile surmounted by a laurel crown (as worn by the Roman Emperor) quite clearly symbolised the submission of Egypt to Roman control. But his official reign as Rome's first emperor is usually considered not to have begun until January 27 BCE when among many other honours offered to him by the Senate he accepted the title of 'Augustus', which he adopted as his personal name and by which he was known for the rest of his long life. Veterans of the Roman legions
who had served Julius Caesar in his Nile campaigns, at the end of
fifteen years of soldiering, were given plots of land to cultivate on
the plain of Nîmes.

Glanum

The south face – horsemen hunt for wild boar in a forest. One horseman is
wounded and dying in the arms of a companion. This may represent the
legend of the hunt for the Calydonian Boar, conducted by Meleager, with
Castor and Pollux shown on horseback.

East face – an infantryman unhorses an Amazon warrior, a warrior takes
trophies from a dead enemy, and the figure of Fame recites the story of
the battle to a man and woman. The scene may be inspired by the
Amazonomachy, the mythical war between the Greeks and the Amazons.

North face – a battle of horsemen, and a winged victory carries a trophy.

West face – a scene from the Iliad and Trojan War, the Greeks and Trojans fighting for the body of Patroclus.

The triumphal arch stood just outside the northern gate of the city, next to the mausoleum and was the visible symbol of Roman power and authority. It was built near the end of the reign of Augustus Caesar (who died in 14 AD). The upper portion of the arch, including the inscription, are missing. The sculptures decorating the arch illustrated both the civilization of Rome and the dire fate of her enemies. The panel to the right of the entrance shows a female figure seated on a pile of weapons, and a Gaullish prisoner with his hands tied behind him. The panel to the left shows another prisoner in a Gaullish cloak, with a smaller man, wearing his cloak in the Roman style, placing his hand on the shoulder of the prisoner. On the reverse side of the arch are sculptures of two more pairs of Gaullish prisoners.
The city’s main street covers the town drains for much of its length. Glanum
did not survive the collapse of the Roman Empire. The town was overrun
and destroyed by the Alamanni in 260 CE and subsequently abandoned, its
inhabitants moving a short distance north into the plain to found a city
that eventually became modern day Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. After its
abandonment Glanum became a source of stone and other building materials
for Saint-Remy. Since the Roman system of drains and sewers was not
maintained, the ruins became flooded and covered with mud and sediment.
In front of the baths, with a section of the hypocaust shown in the background. The thermal baths were built following a simple layout, from 75 BCE. They were a focus for social life in Antiquity, and a major Romanising factor. Nearby are two houses, one on the right with Hellenic peristyles, the other on the road which used to be decorated with a mosaic representing a capricorn.
The house with antae is typical of Mediterranean houses with its rooms laid out around a courtyard with a pool. It is named after two pilasters decorated with Corinthian capitals, called antae.
Beside the carved fountain for filling the natatio
The Hellenistic Bouleteurion with the partially reconstructed temple in the background. The Bouleuterion was the assembly hall for dignitaries during the Hellenistic period. It is terraced on three sides and originally had a central altar.
Montmajour Abbey
Montmajour Abbey, formally the Abbey of St. Peter in Montmajour, was a fortified Benedictine monastery built between the 10th and 18th centuries on what was originally an island three miles north of Arles.


Check out the incredible restoration

Arles in the background

With Chapelle Sainte-Croix behind
A Neolithic grace site nearby


The
Arch of Carpentras is a Roman triumphal arch from the beginning of the
first century CE. It has a single fornix, framed by fluted lesenes and
decorated with an archivolt of vine tendrils. At the outer corners there
are engaged columns and on the sides are images of trophies flanked by
barbarian prisoners. These trophy reliefs are also found on the short
sides of the Arch of Orange, which is however more richly decorated.
The arch was originally located on the city's cardo maximus. Later it
was incorporated into the old cathedral as an access door and still
later into the episcopal palace (now the courthouse). Various theories
have been proposed for the motivation for its construction. The theories
are essentially based on the interpretation of the barbarian prisoners
on the two reliefs (on the west side a German and an eastern barbarian
with a Phrygian beard, another eastern barbarian and a person with a
diadem which might indicate a Hellenistic king on the east side). Gilbert Picard has proposed that the arch was built to symbolically
commemorate the victory of Augustus in the eastern and northern regions.
Pierre Gros also proposed a date before 10 CE on the basis of the
decorative motifs and a reference to the theme of Augustus' universal
victory in the face of the succession issue of the last years of this
Emperor's reign. R. Turcan has instead suggested that it was a
celebration of the victories of Tiberius in the east and west in the
years 18-19, perhaps related to the foundation of the colonia Julia
Meminorum at Carpentras.
Aix en Provence
An American signal corps cameraman preparing to film troops