There is a view of Marseille that spins around. It is captured from a chosen point along the coast that connects Plage des Catalans to Vallon des Auffes. It is so mundane that even the person writing, during their first visit to the second most populous city in France (with Paris taking the top spot, of course), was impressed by the shot taken on a disposable camera. The Mediterranean asserts itself and has something untamed about it. A strip of land acts as a fake headland. Old buildings jutting out over the sea evoke a warm and salty thought: windows perched above the waves, dreams of the South.

Marseille is the oldest city in France and it’s dirty; there’s no other way to put it. The Greeks officially started building it six hundred years before Christ, and five hundred years later, the first port was established. Under the Romans, it was called Massalia. Like any major port on the mare nostrum that respects itself, the settlement, by keeping to itself, simply can’t handle it. It welcomes, it’s contested, it stays faithful only to its borders and its identity. Of that dirt, today, Marseille is proud. Rats in the streets at night, at times the acrid smells of human urine, the fear of bringing home a cockroach or two – not to mention a bedbug – well hidden in a suitcase. Well, baby: of all these concerns, the people of Marseille just don’t care. Here we are in Africa, surely in France because they couldn’t care less. But then in the United Kingdom, in Flanders, in Italy: for a few days or for life, everyone wants Marseille. Everything is cool.“