First 24 Hours: Marseille
A City Captured in One Sweet Bite

Article by: Donna Wheeler, November 2006

My imagined Marseille owed a lot to La Ville est Tranquille, the heartbreaking but mesmerising portrait of the city by local filmmaker, Robert Guédiguian. As I took in the view from the steps of Saint-Charles station in the heat of the late afternoon, and as my friend drove fast through the back streets of the Quartier Belsance and along the Corniche JFK, I swam in Guédiguian's words: 'When one looks at Marseille from Notre-Dame de la Garde, one gets the impression of an elongated city, stretched out as if to rest from the day's fatigue. I always thought that this serenity was nothing but a façade, but that bad things were swarming, dangerous scary things that could at any time set fire to this town…'

As Guédiguian suggests, Marseille sprawls. It emanates a passive-aggressive torpor rather than the heady portside throb of its Italian counterpart, Naples. But, for my stay at least, the serenity remained intact. The only thing setting fire to the town was the sunset and a few soccer-crazed teenagers shooting off flares. After dinner - wonderful fish couscous and Tunisian wine - I fell asleep wondering if Marseille and I were going to hit it off. I was yet to feel that butterfly feeling in my stomach, the one that's akin to falling in love; the feeling that keeps you buying plane tickets when you know you should be more sensible.

The navette's point of difference lies in the delicate but haunting flavour and the curious shape.

The next morning, on a sun-baked balcony in Corbusier's magnificent Unité d'Habitation, I savoured the view of the sea before setting out to find breakfast. After talking US foreign policy with a kindly Algerian grocer and scoffing a few handfuls of fat cherries and sweet almonds, it wasn't long before I found myself veering into a boulangerie-pâtissierie. For me, the travel god is always in the details, and the detail is often in things I’m about to eat. I felt giddy as I feasted my eyes on the olive-laden fougasse, the boxed diamonds of ultra-marzipan callison from Aix and the various piles of stacked bread and biscuits. The main attraction here was, however, the navette, Marseille's signature biscuit, and I promptly bought a half-kilo.

This little biscuit has an unremarkable texture. It's crisp but slightly crumbly, like a tart crust. The point of difference lies in the delicate but haunting flavour and the curious shape. I'm not sure if it was the languorous maritime landscape or the singlet-clad locals that turned my thoughts carnal, but I couldn't help but think that the navette resembled, shall we say, an essential part of the female anatomy. Once this thought had crossed my mind, navettes popped up all over town, from street corners to the supermarché, in every possible permutation: rough-hewn, chocolate-chipped, baguette-sized, machine-made, piled in pyramids. Every pâtissier was a pornographer.

Although the navette has come to symbolise the city, this pastry component of the Candlemas rite was dreamed up relatively recently.

The navette, whatever my heat-struck mind had conjured into being, is actually the shape of a little boat. (The word's meaning in French extends to general notions of a shuttle as well as the tool used in weaving.) Along with their secular life of daily coffee dunkings, thousands of the biscuits are blessed every February as part of the Candlemas celebrations at the Abbaye St-Victor; they're taken home by parishioners to ensure holy protection. Although the navette has come to symbolise the city, this pastry component of the Candlemas rite was dreamed up relatively recently, in 1781, by the canny owner of the Abbey-side boulangerie now known as La Four Des Navettes. The biscuit's shape recalls an older, pagan rite: boats carrying candles were once launched down the River Sorgue in winter. The lit boats were a metaphor for the year's turn towards the light of spring. The navette's shape also alludes to a medieval Gnostic myth, in which a magical craft disgorges les Saintes, a crew of biblical celebs that included Mary Magdalene, on a nearby shore. Given the link to the cult of Magdalene - the divine prostitute - my own first impressions don't seem so far-fetched.

Later that day, watched over by the chalky calanques, my friend and I floated in the tepid tea-coloured sea, talking of Marseille's unmistakable beauty and exhilarating diversity, but also its stubbornness, its sloth, its impermeability to outsiders. I still wasn't sure where I stood with Marseille. If it was going to be love, it would be a simmering, slow build of shattered assumptions and pleasant surprises, rather than the instant enchantment I had expected. But no matter how I felt, the crumbly navettes helped me find my bearings. Beyond their baroque back-story and beguilingly outré shape, each bite announces where it is you actually are. Yes, it's France, but it's the France that firmly faces the southern, African shore of the Mediterranean. The scent of orange-blossom water is a potent reminder of this city's long, close association with the Maghreb and the Levant. And a reminder of how rich and complex the Mediterranean world always was, and continues to be.