Dining in Saorge France

 

Though I think the mountain village of Saorge would be considered a tourist destination of the Cote D'Azur, it was the first one we went to that felt like getting away from the Cote D'Azur. We were with other tourists on the train, but hardly a glut, more like a small sprinkling somewhat overwhelmed by school groups moving between towns, and though our destination town was sleepy and small, it had real life to it. The people living there, as few as they were, outnumbered those of us visiting. In short, more people were hauling around bags of stuff and running their morning routines on a Friday morning than there were wide-eyed tourists, taking pictures, like me.

The cafe we had lunch at reflected the remove from the fancy coast where we live as well. Ingrained with decades of food challenges in traveling the small country towns of America, it was not a natural adjustment for me to go now to a small village and get a plate of utterly delicious mushrooms for seven euros, pastis and cappuccino for three or four each, and a lovely plate of four good quality diverse cheeses for eight euros. But so it was. And we happily sat out hiding in the shade at an outdoor restaurant table nibbling and talking of our good fortunes and swatting at the occasional annoying fly.

Using the bathroom before setting on our way was its own treat. It was up an impossibly tight spiral staircase and left me free to look around an upstairs interior room of the historic village. Among the 850 year history of brilliant engineering and charming construction feats in Saorge, adding in plumbing everywhere was surely not the least of them.

Your guide to Saorge France

 

Humming along on my six day festival of photographs of Saorge, France, which is a heralded member of the Beaux Villages de France, it did occur to me that I don't know very much about Saorge. Yes, it is one of the 100 most beautiful villages of France. Yes, it is up the mountains from the Cote d'Azur, getting pretty close there to crossing into Italy. And yes it is picturesquely built on the steep hillsides as they climb off into the mountains above. In the end of May we could still see some patches of ice lingering on the mountaintops above us.

But what else is there about Saorge?

So I looked it up.

And...

I didn't find anything of note. I mean, Wikipedia is nice but I think it peaked circa 2015. Now it just gets wider, but no deeper.

So...

Saorge is old.

It has a church.

It has a monastery. And something something Italy then France.

Er. So, maybe we'll just continue with my impressions and I'll make stuff up as needed. How's that?

Saorge was founded in 1182. It grew quickly due to its success in producing honey, which it provided to the sugar craving people living in the valleys below. It has its own dialect of French which people say is slower, more measured, and easier to understand, though I was still pretty confused by it. I did understand "miel" and "reina" and "abeille" which mean honey, queen, and bee, which just goes to show these people are still into the same stuff they were into 850 years ago.

That's cool.

So we bought tons of honey.

The town has a fantastic church, a baroque one, and I don't say this lightly, but in this wee mountain town was the prettiest church I have seen so far on all of the Cote D'Azur! I am a big fan of churches but after a baptism (so to speak) in Rome, a lot of the rest of Europe has been a slight let down. Like, if you don't have Caravaggio and Bernini and Michelangelo to do your church decorating what's your plan instead? So many places just went for the same kind of thing, only not as good. The church in Saorge took a different route, high as they were on bee pollen and mountain flowers. They went gaudy instead, and it works way better. They used crazy colors, purples particularly, that I have rarely seen anywhere. And instead of impressive moralism, they, for once, seemed to have some fun with it. 

It's great. Among our 42 pictures there are at least a couple church pictures.

At the edge of town they also have a monastery, where we spent a lot of our time, both hanging out on its parklike grounds, waiting for it to reopen after lunch, and also inside among its more Renaissance delights and beautiful gardens. Even more of my pictures are from here. It should be noted that this is no longer a Monastery, but is owned by The State now, and cost fourteen euros because Capitalism.

Have I mentioned that France is secretly just America under a more tasty pastry shell? 

No? 

Well let's not get into all that now. 

Here are some pictures of the delicious pastry shell then:

Saorge, France and the forks in the road

 

It did not occur to me when we were walking, and climbing, the streets of Saorge, but it occurs to me now that the most striking difference to that particular village, in contrast to any other town I've been to, is how when one walked through it, and one came to an option for which path to take forward, the options weren't so much left and right, rather they were up and down. Saorge wasn't built climbing the cliff, like many hilly or steep towns are. It is built along the face of it. And a lot of the time one can walk through it on an almost normal seeming flat street between buildings, but excitingly everything in always veering off in a plunge or a climb, and suddenly one is walking over some other way, or walking under it.

We are on day two of our pictures of Saorge where I show seven of my 42 meticulously completed pictures everyday. We were in Saorge at the end of last week, a respite before our seemingly unending adventure with covid decided to resurge.

Luckily I have all these beautiful memories as the sound of coughing rings out once again through the house.

Forty two views of Saorge France

 

At the end of last week we got up early (for us), walked up to the train station (a short walk), and got on The Train of Marvels. This train, really just a regular local train but with a bit better, less scratched up windows, climbs up into the mountains of the French Alps and in less than two hours deposited us up among the fresh air and flowing mountain streams. 

It was kind of a miracle.

Our station, near to the last, was called Fontan Saorge. Absolutely nothing is around the train station of Fontan Saorge, but you can walk 15 minutes down the narrow mountain road to Fontan, or up it, for about as long, through a tunnel, along soaring valley views, until you arrive at Saorge, officially one of the 100 most beautiful villages of France (there are actually somewhere closer to 180 of them, but France is BIG).

I'm pretty sure this day was the kind of thing we meant in retiring here.

Saorge is like,

what you get born for.

It's sort of perched on a cliff there, like something vaguely Tibetan, and it's winding, layered in its Seussian qualities so strongly that this odd thought once flitted through my mind there: 

Dr. Seuss wasn't that inventive, he just went to France.

I took hundreds of pictures in and around Saorge. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. I brought them back in my phone and have been working on them non stop over the weekend. I have settled on, or worked my way to 42 pictures of Saorge to tell the story of the place. These are not really travelogue pictures. I did not make them to tell you about our day exactly. I took them from pure interest, and then tried to put everything I felt about Saorge and even France, into them. Some of the pictures are barely edited, or even completely as they came out from my camera. Some are elaborate fantasias so meticulously built out of the scene I started with that they might as well be paintings.

But they're all Saorge.

Each day for the next six days I will tell you a little about lovely Saorge, the Mountain village, and I will show you seven pictures. The pictures are not an explanation for what I have to say. They more invite you to figure out what they might be, or feel what it was like. They're just Saorge.

There are a lot of cats.

I hope you like them.