Arles: Roman Ruins in Provence
An hour from Marseille by train, and Arles feels like stepping through a seam in time — except there are several centuries on the other side, all occupying the same space. Roman amphitheater. Medieval alleyways. Van Gogh’s café. Street art on 2,000-year-old stone. The place doesn’t sort itself into eras. It just exists, all of it at once, with the confidence of somewhere that doesn’t need to explain its own significance.
Van Gogh came to Arles in 1888, rented a yellow house, and spent 14 months painting obsessively — over 300 works in that time, including Café Terrace at Night and The Starry Night Over the Rhône. He cut off part of his own ear here. The city has been quietly living with that legacy ever since, in the way a very old place absorbs new chapters without making too much of a fuss.
The Amphitheater
The amphitheater was built around 90 AD, modeled on the Colosseum in Rome, capacity somewhere around 20,000 for gladiatorial contests and chariot races. Two things distinguish it from other Roman ruins: it’s remarkably intact, and it still hosts events. Bullfights today, concerts, spectacles. The continuity of function — people gathering here to watch something — has been essentially uninterrupted for nearly two millennia.
The upper galleries are walkable. From up there, the arena floor is clearly visible below, and you can hear the acoustics. The stone seating has worn smooth in places where thousands of people sat for hundreds of years. At some point in the medieval period, residents built an entire neighborhood inside the structure — houses in the arches, streets between the old walls. The amphitheater became a town within a town. Most of that has been cleared, but knowing it happened makes the space feel even denser with time.
The Roman Theater
A few minutes’ walk away, the Roman Theater is older — built in the 1st century BC under Augustus — and considerably more fragmentary. Most of it was quarried for other buildings over the centuries, which was common medieval practice. What’s left: two tall columns, sections of the stage wall, the curved sweep of semicircular seating. Enough to triangulate the original scale. Theater capacity was around 10,000. You stand in the ruins now and the birds are louder than anything else.
Underground
The Cryptoportiques are the strangest thing in Arles, and that’s saying something. Built in the 1st century BC as foundations for the Roman Forum above, they’re long underground galleries — barrel-vaulted stone corridors stretching beneath the modern streets. The air drops ten degrees when you descend. It’s dark and cool and damp, and you can hear the faint sound of the city above you while you’re walking in these tunnels that haven’t changed structurally since the Forum was built on top of them. Disorienting in a good way. The kind of place that makes the past feel very close.
From the Top
Back up in the amphitheater’s upper gallery, the city opened up in every direction. Terracotta rooftops, stone walls, church towers, and in the distance, the Rhône. Van Gogh painted this city compulsively from ground level. From up here you can see why he stayed — the light on Arles is different, golden and sharp in May, and the density of the old town has a beauty that’s almost architectural in its composition.
The Place de l’Amphithéâtre traces the oval footprint of the arena’s exterior — cafés have moved into the arches, tables spill onto the cobblestones, and people sit having lunch with a Roman ruin as the back wall. It’s one of those casual Mediterranean arrangements that feels completely natural until you stop to think about what it actually is.
The Walls Between Old and New
Didn’t expect the street art. Moving through the old town between the Roman monuments, someone has been painting — bright contemporary murals on stone walls that have been absorbing things for 2,000 years. It’s not incongruous. It’s just the current layer on surfaces that have been tagged by every era that passed through here. The Romans made their marks. The medieval town made theirs. This is Arles in 2023, still leaving something on the walls.
Train back to Marseille was quiet. Arles rewards the visit more than most day trips I’ve taken anywhere. Not because it checks off a historical site, but because it actually is several different things at once and doesn’t pretend otherwise. The Roman ruins, the Van Gogh light, the Provençal pace, the underground galleries that nobody above them knows you’re in. All of it stacked on top of itself. All of it still present.
