Salernes Market

        Years ago when I was studying the Journals of Christopher Columbus, I found myself rather shocked by the feebleness of his powers of description. Here he was sailing about the Indies seeing strange and wonderful things entirely unknown in Europe, assigning them all to two unhelpful categories: “like what we have in Castile” and “not like what we have in Castile.” Yet here I sit at a verandah table looking eastward into the lightening dawn across a little valley to a range of low, green hills thinking “How like an early autumnal daybreak in the Ozarks”. Fog obscures all in the first low bottom. Behind it, rising from the second, it forms a kind of ghostly backdrop or theater flat to a ridge of hilltop trees, then behind that a dark green mass of undifferentiated forest on a hill almost of sufficient size to be called a mountain. Above all this the sky is of that blue inevitably called cerulean, though streaked with long, thin trails of cloud rendered golden by a rising sun, of which my vantage point allows me only the glimpse of a glow atop another large hill.

 

        One remembers landscape vividly but imperfectly. We arrived at Nice airport a little ahead of schedule. It seemed to be the right place except for one thing—it was virtually empty. Instead of forty car drivers holding up their signs, there were two. One of them had our name on it, and the person holding it was an attractive, petite young woman who leapt for our luggage and led us a few paces to a black Mercedes. The first week of September is a very good time to arrive in the south of France . The Parisians are back in Paris. The roads are empty—well, not quite empty, but far from the vibe of the Atlantic City Expressway. The drive to Salernes, though brief, is sufficient for one to experience most versions of the generally superb French highway system from super-highways to country roads. And all along the roads dozens of those little things you hadn’t remembered perfectly—the miles of expertly constructed stone wall, the peculiar dry greens of certain vegetation, the characteristic elegant road signs, the sometimes hideous commercial signage, the huge open warehouses of tiles and ceramics. And everybody driving new cars. Our first memories of the Provençal countryside go back to the early 1960s, when vehicles were fairly sparse, and every other one was a tired gray rattletrap Citroën utility truck, the farmer’s version of the classic Deux Chevaux that we ourselves were driving. Salernes is a bit over an hour from the Nice airport, but the only really challenging driving Ms. Celine faced came in the last two hundred yards of the trip. As it nears our friend’s house, the long private driveway features a dramatic curve on a sharp rise with a rough masonry wall on one side and on the other a drop into a mini-gorge. So far as I know, nobody has ever actually driven into this chasm, but the possibility does come into one’s mind while driving by. When you get to the straight and flat at the top, you are quite near the house, Saint Michel, and you have a clear view of its side and one of its most delightful features, the long stone patio or verandah that fronts the house’s broad side, overlooking a delightful view, and on which its inhabitants spend a great deal of time lounging, loafing, reading, conversing and most especially eating. It must have been close to two in the afternoon when we arrived to find our hosts seated around a table with other guests who had arrived before us lingering over the remnants of what they described as lunch but seemed to feature glasses of orange juice and the crumbled flakes from croissants. Just saying. 

        Even “luxury” air travel, with which we had indulged ourselves, left me exhausted and with the feeling that I had little furry sweaters covering my teeth. The rest of Saturday, after a fairly brief period of joyous reunions, was mainly sleep. But Sunday, the beginning of a new week, offered the opportunity for the distinctively French experience of “market day”. Throughout the rural areas of France, and especially in the south, regionally itinerant merchants set up their tented or canopied outdoor stalls in prominent public places and hawk their goods for half a day. Each town has its market day, and the merchants make the rounds. The weekends are particularly choice from the commercial point of view, and the comparative regional prominence of Salernes is signaled by its Sunday morning assignment. The dramatic decline of Catholic observance is likewise obvious in the arrangement. Fewer and fewer people attend Mass, and there are fewer and fewer priests to perform it. At Salernes the town square is briefly turned into a magnificent food bazaar: table after table of high quality vegetables, charcuterie, seafood, steaming cauldrons of couscous and paella, every variety of sausage and olive known to the race, cheeses, bakery goods, novelty sweets. At a lower level of the town, in space normally reserved for parking, is the market’s textile section. I did not visit it personally on Sunday, but if the experience of previous years can be trusted, it increasingly approaches the style of an American flea market rather an actual dry goods mart, with lots of cheap Chinese stuff of the Dollar Store genre. But of course you still find gorgeous Provençal tablecloths and some occasional nice handwork, and everything has today’s engagingly multicultural French accent. I went home happy with my purchases: mainly sausages. Joan was less happy. One man’s meat…But what a great beginning to a week away.

                                             Salernes Market on the town square