When you think of the glamorous coastal resorts of the South of France, the first names to spring to mind are the really famous ones like Nice and Cannes, St Tropez and Juan-les-Pins. Then you discover Cassis, along the coast to the east of Marseille. This, you feel, as you wander down to the harbour in the warm evening, is what St Tropez must have been like fifty years ago.
Once a fishing village, Cassis is now a fashionably charming mooring for yachts and centre for sea trips. I wrote about it several times when I first started this blog - it has, after all, a relevance to The Lantern - and then haven't returned because I haven't returned in real life either for the past couple of years.
So instead of rewriting earlier posts, I'm just going to leave the links here, starting with what I wrote about the French artist Olivier Boissinot's stinging blue and turquoise painting (above) of the nearby Calanques.
Link: The Calanques: jazzy blue
Here's an early post about Cassis's literary connections. The Bloomsbury set came to the town in the 1920s, as did D H Lawrence to the equally enchanting resort of Sanary-sur-Mer further along the coast. Then there was Edith Wharton at Hyeres, where she wrote several novels, including The Age of Innocence.
Link: Red rocks at Cassis
And finally here's a very short post, mainly to illustrate the other-worldly red rocks in the wilder parts of this rocky Mediterranean coastline, as described by Eve in the opening chapter of my book.
Link: The rocks glow red
