Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

Researching my guidebooks in France comes with very good eating. Each night my co-author Steve Smith and I blitz the town’s restaurant scene (often with a local food expert in tow) — checking atmospheric squares, visiting places already in our book, and checking in on highly recommended new places. Then comes our little reward: At about 9:45 or 10:00, we sit down to eat at our favorite of all the places we visited. This is some of the most rewarding work for our guidebook…and enjoyable, too!

This photo typifies the scene in so many towns throughout Europe: a young, creative restaurateur serving fun and tasty local dishes for €10 to €15 each. I love the ritual of bringing over the big blackboard. These days, you’ll often find two versions — one in French and one in English.

All over Europe, food tours are trendy. I take many of them in hopes of finding ones to recommend in our guidebooks, and also to learn fun new angles on the local food scene. Some tours are too slow and expensive. Others are fast-paced and reasonably priced. Steve and I enjoyed a morning food tour with Avignon food guide Aurelie, which had the bonus of a small group size. (A nice thing about food tours is that, because they’re squeezing into small shops and restaurants, they max out at only eight or ten people and can depart with as few as three — the size of our group on this morning.) Here’s how I wrote up the tour for our guidebook:

The Avignon Gourmet Walking Tour is a wonderful experience if you like to eat. Charming and passionate Aurelie meets small groups daily (except Sun and Mon) at the TI at 9:15 for a well-designed, three-hour, eight-stop walk. Her tour is filled with information and tastes of top-quality local foods and drinks, and finishes in the market hall (€55, 2-8 people per group, book in advance on her website, www.avignongourmetours.com).

Well-preserved medieval quarters of towns in the South of France all have charming squares filled with charming restaurants. These days, a place with no outdoor seating might as well not open on a hot night, when everyone wants to eat outdoors. Many places have two zones — inside and outside — and only open one or the other each evening.

Out and about with a healthy appetite, it’s hard to know which delightful scene to sit down and eat in. Aix-en-Provence may not have any blockbuster sights, but its old center offers a postcard square around every corner.

Throughout the ancient world, aqueducts were like flags of stone that heralded the greatness of Rome. A visit to the Pont du Gard (the most famous and impressive surviving Roman aqueduct, near Avignon) shows how these structures still proclaim the wonders of that age. This impressively preserved Roman aqueduct was built in about 19 B.C. The Pont du Gard is actually a bridge over the Gardon River — the most scenic surviving link of that 30-mile structure supporting a small canal which, by dropping one inch for every 100 yards, supplied nine million gallons of water per day (about 100 gallons per second) to Nîmes, one of ancient Europe’s largest cities. Though most of the aqueduct is on or below the ground, at Pont du Gard it spans a canyon on a massive bridge — one of the most remarkable surviving Roman ruins anywhere.

In July and August, there are six tours a day through the water channel at the top of the Pont du Gard (€4, pay the guide directly, tour is in French and English and takes 30 minutes — 10 minutes intro and 20 minutes hiking with commentary, generally starts at the bottom of the hour from 10:30 — times are posted at the museum and entry, be sure to check). There are no reservations; just wait at the metal gate on top of the bridge, on the side opposite the museum. The first 33 people get in. If you do this tour, notice the massive calcium buildup lining the channel from over 400 years of flowing water.

I love to cap my Pont du Gard visit in the city of Nîmes, where you can see the castellum: a modest-looking water distribution tank that was the grand finale of the 30-mile-long aqueduct. The water needs of Roman Nîmes grew beyond the capacity of its local springs. Imagine the jubilation on the day (in A.D. 50) that this system was finally operational. Suddenly, the town had an abundance of water — for basic needs, as well as for cool extras like public fountains. You can see a little social compassion designed into the water-distribution holes. The lower channel served top-priority needs, providing water via stone and lead pipes to the public wells that graced neighborhood squares. The higher holes — which got wet only when the supply was plentiful — routed water to the homes of the wealthy, to public baths, and to nonessential fountains.

Also, in my Travelers Café, Cameron reports on the glitzy Expo Milano 2015 world’s fair.