Aix-en-Provence owes its name to Roman springs and a consul called Sextius
Warm mineral springs drew a Roman consul here in 123 BC, and the town he founded carried his name: Aquae Sextiae, the waters of Sextius. Two thousand years later Aix is a city of fountains, plane trees and roughly 300 sunny days a year, once the haunt of Cézanne and Zola.
Aix sits on a plain above the Arc river, about 30 kilometres north of Marseille, with Montagne Sainte-Victoire visible to the east. Around 148,000 people live there. Its Mediterranean climate is a little more extreme than the coast's, averaging 6 °C in January and 24 °C in July, with just 58 rainy days, and the town is only partly sheltered from the cold, gusty Mistral.
Sextius Calvinus founded the settlement after destroying the Gallic stronghold at nearby Entremont. In 102 BC the Roman general Gaius Marius defeated the Teutones and Ambrones close by. The town later became capital of a Roman province, then was taken by the Visigoths in 477 and fought over by Franks, Lombards and Saracens. Its golden age came after the 12th century under the houses of Barcelona and Anjou, when it flourished as a capital of art and learning. Provence joined the French crown in 1487, and Louis XII installed its parliament at Aix in 1501, where it sat until 1789. Excavations have uncovered a Roman amphitheatre, and a bed of Miocene fossil bones once inspired a local dragon legend.
The Cours Mirabeau, a broad avenue shaded by double rows of plane trees and dotted with fountains, traces the old city wall and splits the town in two: the tangle of the medieval quarter and its grand mansions to the north, newer districts to the south and west. On it stood Les Deux Garçons, a brasserie opened in 1792 whose customers included Cézanne, Zola and Hemingway; a fire on 3 November 2019 gutted it.
The cathedral of the Holy Saviour rises on the old Roman forum and blends styles from the 5th to the 17th century, from a Merovingian baptistery ringed by Roman columns to a triptych showing King René. The town hall square has a clock tower of 1510 and an ornate 18th-century corn exchange, and not far away a spa built in 1705 stands beside the remains of the Roman baths.
Source: Aix-en-Provence
