Фрежюс

Fréjus began as Forum Julii — Julius Caesar's market town on the Via Aurelia — and became the naval base where Augustus stationed the fleet that had won at Actium. Rome is still everywhere underfoot: an amphitheatre that seated ten thousand, a theatre, arcades of the aqueduct striding through the pines, and the outline of the ancient port, long since silted into gardens. Napoleon knew the harbour's meaning too: he landed here in 1799, returning from Egypt to seize his destiny, and sailed from the same coast to Elba in 1814.

The medieval town answered antiquity with one of Provence's treasures: the cathedral close, whose baptistery is among the oldest Christian buildings in France, and whose cloister hides a painted wooden ceiling — hundreds of small panels of angels, monsters and grotesques, a medieval bestiary flickering above the walled garden. The town also carries a modern grief with dignity: the Malpasset dam broke in 1959, and Fréjus remembers.

Today the Roman name lives on in the Théâtre Intercommunal Le Forum, the modern stage shared with neighbouring Saint-Raphaël, where the concert and theatre seasons of the eastern Var are played out — a forum still, in the original sense of the word. Between the arena, the cloister and the beaches of the Esterel coast, Fréjus offers two millennia within a twenty-minute walk, which is roughly the Provençal average.