Narbo Via

Narbonne's "Museum of Romanity" which has been 10 years in the making, finally opened yesterday, delayed for a few extra months by lockdown. Numbers are limited, so you have to book a 2-hour slot, which we duly did.

My blip is of its key feature, the "wall of stones", running the length of the building and dividing the public part from the research part. This is a large part of Narbonne's famous collection of fragments of Roman sculpture, previously housed in large piles in a disused church and "enhanced" by a ludicrous son-et-lumière show. The stones are certainly better lit now, and there's a robot which can take a selected stone and display it in a slot surrounded by screens (you can see this in the centre of the photo).

One of the big disadvantages of the previous display was that there was zero information about the stones, even if you could see them in the dimness. I'm afraid this new and very expensive display is little better. There are some large interactive touch screens with no instructions provided, with a diagram containing photos of each stone in the rack. Most of them are greyed out, but you can theoretically tap on some of them to get more information. Except that the response seemed a bit hit-and-miss. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Also there was no obvious way of locating the stone you were looking at between the actual stones and the screen other than wandering up and down and looking for it. We gave up in the end. 

In fact in general I was surprised at the lack of interactivity, which I thought was a given in museums these days. Apart from the wall, the rest of the museum consists of objects displayed in small groups with minimal labelling: mostly stone sculptures, but also a couple of mosaic floors and a number of painted walls from the Clos de la Lombarde, and very scanty and unremarkable items in pottery and glass. Almost no context is provided, and there aren't even any explanatory videos -- just projections of buildings in plan and 3D, with short captions. It's certainly not somewhere you would take children. Nothing about everyday life, the social context, trading relationships ... Bear in mind that Narbonne was the most important Roman provincial town outside Italy, although it now has no standing remains.

We speculated on why these choices were made. "They ran out of money after they paid Norman Foster to design the building," suggested S. "Or they just don't give a sh*t about the public."  The building is pretty bland for a Foster creation -- basically a large box made of brick-coloured concrete. Anyway, my small album is here.

Once we'd finished looking, we walked along the canal into town. It's been a glorious day, 25C with no wind, and we decided to take a chance on finding a table on a terrace on the Barques. It was easier than we expected -- we grabbed the one empty table outside a tapas place we've been to before. It was as if someone had flicked a switch and sent us back in time to 2019, except for the ubiquitous masks. The Thursday street market was on, full of stalls selling "non-essential" items for the first time in months. All the terraces were packed to the allowed limit. 

Looking around after sitting down, I immediately spotted B with four of her friends, so we popped over to say hello. I have to say I was not in the least surprised to see her -- like us she has been longing to resume social activities, and like us this was her second lunch out in two days. See the extra for just how packed and lively the restaurants were! NB this is not the terrace we chose; ours was less busy and we had a table right on the edge of it.

We just had a few tapas and a non-alcoholic drink each, and then headed home via Picard and Grand Frais to stock up on goodies (can't go to Narbonne without doing this). Still baking hot when we got back, and we were tired due to all this unaccustomed activity. It really feels like summer all of a sudden.