City Guide - Marseille

The most renowned and populated city in France after Paris, MARSEILLE has - like the capital - prospered and been ransacked over the centuries. It has lost its privileges to sundry French kings and foreign armies, recovered its fortunes, suffered plagues, religious bigotry, republican and royalist Terror and had its own Commune and Bastille-storming. It was the presence of so many Marseillaise Revolutionaries marching from the Rhine to Paris in 1792 which gave the Hymn of the Army of the Rhine its name of La Marseillaise , later to become the national anthem.

Today, it's an undeniable fact that Marseille is a deprived city, not particularly beautiful architecturally, and with acres of grim 1960s housing estates. Yet it's a wonderful place to visit - a real, down-to-earth yet cosmopolitan port city with a trading history going back over 2500 years. The people are gregarious, generous, endlessly talkative and unconcerned if their style seems provocatively vulgar to the snobs of the Côte d'Azur

The city's airport , the Aéroport de Marseille-Provence (tel 04.42.14.14.14, www.marseille.airport.fr ), is 20km northwest of the city centre, and linked to the gare SNCF by a shuttle bus service (every 20min 6.10am-9.50pm; 45F/?6.86). The gare SNCF St-Charles is on the northern edge of the 1er arrondissement on esplanade St-Charles (tel 04.91.08.50.50), just round the corner from the gare routière , on place Victor-Hugo (tel 04.91.08.16.40). From the gare SNCF , a monumental Art Deco staircase leads down to boulevard d'Athènes and thence to La Canebière, Marseille's main street. The main tourist office is at 4 La Canebière (July & Aug Mon-Sat 7am-7.30pm, Sun 10am-6pm; rest of year Mon-Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 10am-5pm; tel 04.91.13.89.00, www.marseille-tourisme.fr ), down by the Vieux Port.

Marseille has all the social, economic and political ills of France writ large. In addition, it has to contend with its notoriety for protection rackets and shoot-outs, corruption, drug-money laundering and prostitution. But the city's dangerous reputation is unfair - not because it's unfounded but because underworld activities flourish just as much, if not more, elsewhere on the Côte d'Azur.

Marseille's nightlife has something for everyone, with plenty of live rock and jazz, as well as the more choice pastimes of theatre-, opera- and concert-going. Virgin Megastore, at 75 rue St-Ferréol (Mon-Thurs 9am-9pm, Fri & Sat 9am-midnight, Sun 9am-7pm), and the ticket bureau in the tourist office are the best places to go for tickets and information on gigs, concerts, theatre, free films and whatever cultural events are going on. Virgin also stocks a wide selection of English books and runs a café on the top floor. Other places with info are the book and record shop FNAC, on the top floor of the Centre Bourse (Mon-Sat 10am-7pm), the café, travel agency and comic shop La Passerelle, 26 rue des Trois-Mages (noon-midnight), and the New Age music shop Tripsichord , next door. At any of these places, you can pick up a copy of Taktik , Marseille's independent free weekly listings paper, which comes out on a Wednesday.

The Marseillais eat just as well, if not better, than the ageing aristos and skin-stretched celebrities of the Riviera. Fish and seafood are the main ingredients, and the superstar of dishes is the city's own expensive invention, bouillabaisse , a saffron- and garlic-flavoured fish soup with bits of fish, croutons and rouille to throw in; theories conflict as to which fish should be included and where and how they must be caught, but one essential fish is the rascasse or scorpion fish. The other city speciality is the less exotic pieds et paquets , mutton or lamb belly and trotters.