It's best to visit Aix-en-Provence off-season, forgetting as quickly as possible France's attempt to add the Sainte-Victoire mountain and the places where the painter Cézanne lived to the World Heritage List. In this, I fully agree with Matejicek! I don't understand why Cézanne? Why not Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, to name just a few of the great French painters? Or Rothko's chapel? The history of painting did not stop with him, and other painters also lived somewhere and left their marks... Unless greed rears starts to show in Aix?

With all the good will in the world, we tried to visit Cézanne's studio: closed for renovation, the Château du Jas de Bouffan (which is actually a big house): closed for work. The Bibemus quarries: by reservation with a guide on another day. We fell back on the Granet Museum where a meager collection of Cézanne's works is exhibited: 10 paintings in total and a few engravings and drawings far from being major works, also closed. Finally we visited the temporary exhibition.

When you're frustrated, the best thing to do is to go for a walk in nature, under the Sainte-Victoire mountain for example, but, although the walk was very pleasant, this mountain has nothing special that could justify any inscription. Its karst relief culminating at 1,011 meters is nothing characteristic, like this one can find hundreds of them elsewhere in Europe and in the world...

We drove the mobile home Wilson up to the "La Maison Sainte-Victoire" interpretation center, where you can buy a guidebook for local walking tours. There's a large, discreet parking lot available for those who are self-sufficient. There was a small, uninteresting paleontological exhibition, but it was well-reviewed by an enthusiastic student who showed us the few dinosaur bones and eggs found in the nature reserve Matejicek is talking about!

In the end, it was more enjoyable to sip a beer at the Le Relais Cézanne café-restaurant in Le Tholonet while watching the French play pétanque.

From a practical point of view, a new campsite in the Huttopia chain has opened not far from Aix, where you can take the bus that drops you off at Place de la Rotonde, where the town's tourist office is located. The rest can be explored on foot.