Aix-en-Provence: The Cours Mirabeau, Cézanne's Studio and Sainte-Victoire

Required Activities

• At the top of the Cours Sextius, find the one piece of Roman Aix left inside the working baths — a vaulted pool with stone benches along its sides, all that survives of the Observance thermal establishment — and then the rotunda the town put up over the hot spring in 1705 so that the poor could drink and wash there for nothing

• Walk the 440 m of the Cours Mirabeau from the Rotonde to the statue of King René holding his bunch of muscat grapes, finding the three surviving fountains of the four finished in 1696 — the Neuf-Canons, the fontaine moussue under its moss, and the fontaine du Roi René that used to be the Pyramide — and the marker set in the middle of the road cut with the dates 1651 and 2002

• Go up to the studio Cézanne had built on the Lauves hill after buying the ground in November 1901, stand under the tall glass wall he insisted on so the light would fall across the room, and pick out among the easels, paint pots and work clothes the objects he kept there to use as motifs, in the studio he walked up to every day from six in the morning until five

• Climb to the Croix de Provence at 946 m, the cross on the western end of the Sainte-Victoire ridge that is the part visible from Aix — the massif's true summit, the Pic des Mouches at 1,011 m, is 6 km further east — and at the top find the fire lookout that is manned through the summer, and the Prieuré just below the cross

• Walk the kilometre from the studio up to the Jardin des peintres, the small park on the exact ground where Cézanne set up to paint Sainte-Victoire 17 times in watercolour and 11 times in oil between 1902 and 1906, and line up each of the nine canvases reproduced on ceramic there against the ridge in front of you