Pont d'Avignon
— — four arches into the Rhône, then nothing.
Not only on a wall.
“Twenty-two arches once, then a flood in 1668. Now four arches reach from the Avignon bank into the Rhône, and stop. The Chapelle Saint-Nicolas sits on the second pier, named for the patron saint of bargemen who used to work this stretch of river. Children across France still sing Sur le pont d'Avignon. The verses became popular long after the river had taken most of the bridge. Across the water the Palais des Papes holds the bank. The Rhône keeps moving.
Pont d'Avignon, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Pont Saint-Bénézet stretches partway across the Rhône at Avignon, in the Vaucluse département of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, in southern France. Built between 1177 and 1185 according to local tradition, the bridge originally carried twenty-two stone arches from the city to the Île de la Barthelasse and the western bank at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. Repeated floods carried away sections over the following centuries; the great flood of 1668 took most of what remained, and the city stopped rebuilding. Four arches still reach into the river, with the Romanesque Chapelle Saint-Nicolas resting on the second pier. The bridge sits within the historic centre of Avignon, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995 alongside the Palais des Papes that holds the riverbank behind it.
The four surviving arches are built of dressed stone in a slightly elliptical profile that was unusual for twelfth-century European bridge construction. The Chapelle Saint-Nicolas, fitted onto the second pier, has two superimposed sections: a Romanesque lower chapel from the late twelfth century, dedicated to the bridge's legendary builder, and an upper chapel rebuilt in Gothic style in the fifteenth century. Local tradition records that Bénézet, a shepherd boy told in a vision to bridge the Rhône, convinced the city of his calling by lifting a stone too heavy for thirty men. He was canonized after his death in 1184 and is buried in the lower chapel.
The bridge is open to visitors daily, with combined tickets sold alongside the Palais des Papes a few hundred metres back from the riverbank. The walk onto the structure ends at the fourth arch, where a stone parapet looks downriver toward the Île de la Barthelasse. The chapel can be entered. The Rocher des Doms park sits on a limestone outcrop directly above the city and gives the photograph everyone takes of the four-arch ruin from above. The site is run by Avignon Tourisme and stays open through the winter on shorter hours.