Vieux-Port of Marseille
— the harbour the city was built around.
Not only on a wall.
“The original harbour of Marseille: the rectangle of water the Greeks from Phocaea sailed into around 600 BCE and called Lacydon. The city was built around it. Today it is a marina with a daily fish market on the Quai des Belges, ferries to the Frioul islands and the Château d'If, and Notre-Dame de la Garde watching from the hill above. Norman Foster's polished steel canopy went up on the north quay in 2013, a mirror that throws the harbour back at itself. When the mistral comes through, the rigging sings.
Vieux-Port of Marseille, 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.
The Vieux-Port is the natural inlet at the southwestern edge of Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast of France's Bouches-du-Rhône department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. The harbour runs roughly 1,000 metres east to west and opens to the sea between two stone forts: Fort Saint-Nicolas to the south and Fort Saint-Jean to the north. The city of Marseille, France's second-largest after Paris, grew out from the eastern end of this rectangle of water. The Canebière, the central avenue of the city, begins where the quays meet. The basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde sits on a 154-metre limestone hill above the south side, visible from every corner of the port.
Two forts have guarded the entrance to the Vieux-Port since the seventeenth century. Fort Saint-Jean on the north shore incorporates a medieval commandery of the Knights Hospitaller and the Romanesque chapel of Saint-Jean. Fort Saint-Nicolas, opposite, was raised by Louis XIV in 1660 to discipline a city that had defied him. In 2013, when Marseille was European Capital of Culture, Rudy Ricciotti's MuCEM (the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations) opened alongside Fort Saint-Jean, joined to it by a slim footbridge across the harbour mouth. The same year Norman Foster installed L'Ombrière on the Quai de la Fraternité: a polished stainless-steel canopy, 46 metres long and 22 metres deep, supported on eight slender columns, that reflects the harbour and the crowd beneath it.
The fish market on the Quai des Belges runs every morning, the catch sold straight off the boats: a tradition the city traces back to its Greek founding around 600 BCE. Ferries leave the south quay for the Frioul archipelago and for the island fortress of Château d'If, made famous by Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo. The Petit Train and the harbour cruise boats use the same quays. The Vieux-Port metro station opens onto the Quai des Belges, and most visitors arrive on foot down the Canebière. The port itself is permanently open and free to walk; the surrounding quays carry restaurant terraces serving bouillabaisse, the Marseillais fish stew that has its own protected charter signed by city restaurateurs in 1980.