We had a fun day at the Festival d’ Avignon yesterday. There’s a wide range of theater productions happening throughout each day. You’d need a week in Avignon to see them all.
You wouldn’t seek out Avignon primarily for their museums, as you might in Paris. But there are great shops and boutiques, bars and restaurants everywhere, and a cool youthful vibe in the city.
As we were walking through the streets of the walled city, a young women who looked like Audrey Hepburn circa Roman Holiday, approached us riding on the back of a classic red motor scooter. Turns out, she was promoting her evening performance as – Audrey Hepburn! Pausing on her scooter, she sang a tune from My Fair Lady sounding much like Marni Nixon, and then off she went. Later, I snapped a photo of this poster hanging in a shop window.
The majority of the shows were serious drama and as you’d expect, performed in French, so we didn’t buy tickets to any of the featured events, but saw dozens of street performances.
We had a tasty lunch and ice cream cones by the Palace of the Popes, the fourteenth-century Gothic palace built by the popes who made Avignon their home.
Here’s a group of young gals singing a bit of “Hit the Road, Jack” – a favorite song of Pope Innocent VI way back in 1352, hundreds of years before Ray Charles would record the song in 1960, proving the pope’s miraculous powers. Or something like that.
