Day 15: Digg up the architect
Over a decade ago, we rented our French seaside home to families with kids during the summer. The rest of the year guests were people coming for business or for treatment in the nearby thermal bath.
The town of Sète was founded in 1671, to serve as a port at one end of the Canal du Midi, a channel to connect the Mediterranean with the Atlantic. Creating the channel between 1666 and 1681 was the biggest construction work of the 17 century. It leads over 241 km to Toulouse, so fret could go by the river Garonne from Bordeaux to Toulouse, then by channel to the Mediterranean coast or go North by the Rhone river to Lyon and further. Nowadays it’s riverboats full of tourists, who enjoy the quiet pace of the waterway shaded by plane trees.
As the town was built within a very short period, many buildings are constructed in the same way. They have only a small front to the street, but stretch very long. The ground floors were used as warehouses for the port activity, the higher floors for living. The walls are in stone, nearly four feet thick in our building, and windows are set deep, to protect from the heat. The construction in the 17 century attracted many Italian workers, who settled there, enriching the language, culinary arts and the lifestyle.