Arles: The Roman Arena, Van Gogh's Year and the Luma Tower

Required Activities

• Walk the two tiers of galleries round the 25,000-seat amphitheatre and count the medieval defence towers still standing on it — the arena spent centuries as a walled village holding more than two hundred houses and two chapels, and the last of them were only pulled down on 30 December 1840

• Sit high in the antique theatre, on a cavea 102 m across that once held 10,000 people on 33 rows, and look at the two Corinthian columns standing alone on the stage — all that is left of about a hundred that decorated the back wall, whose niches held the Venus of Arles now in the Louvre

• Walk the length of the Alyscamps avenue, where Van Gogh and Gauguin both set up their easels in the autumn of 1888, and notice how few of the sarcophagi are carved: the best were carted off from the Renaissance onwards, and one boatload of them sank in the Rhône

• Stand on the Place du Forum at the café Van Gogh painted in the second week of September 1888 — it was called la Terrasse then and was renamed after him later — and work out where he put his easel to get the yellow lamp against the first starry sky he ever painted; then see the current show at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

• Go up the Luma tower, the building Gehry called his first Roman one, and find the two things he said he was quoting: the glass rotunda at its foot that answers the Roman arena, and the broken rock of the Alpilles in the steel above it; then walk the 4 hectares of new park round it, planted with more than 1,100 trees