Marseille is not quite like anywhere else in France, and certainly not like anywhere else in Europe. It is older than Paris by several centuries — founded by Greek sailors from Phocaea in 600 BC, it has been continuously inhabited ever since, absorbing wave after wave of migration until it became the most genuinely Mediterranean city on the continent: part Provençal, part North African, part Italian, wholly itself.

The instinct to compare it to other French cities is a mistake. It has none of the elegant detachment of Paris, none of Lyon's comfortable bourgeois certainty. It is rougher and more alive — a city that has never bothered to perform for visitors, which is one of the reasons visitors have always found it so compelling. The old port is not a backdrop; it is where things happen.

Give yourself time for the light. The particular quality of the light on the limestone and the sea in the early morning, or in the last hour before sunset when the Basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde catches it and seems to float above the city on a column of gold — this is what the city is most proud of.