The story of Diasporic Jews is a long one. A people whom history has sent into exile from their place of origin. They ended up on unfamiliar ground and adapted their lives. They spoke their host’s language, wear his clothes, adapted his food and use his architectural vocabulary to build their houses and their synagogues, yet all the while they …
Niche Heritage and Cultural Tourism
At Via Nissa, we concentrate the bulk of our non-research efforts on what we might call small-scale specialty tourism or niche heritage and cultural tourism. Our focus on minority groups, such as Jewish history which has become our most frequently requested visit lately, such to the point that we are expanding to Jewish Marseille and eventually into the Jewish Piedmont …
VIA NISSA JEWISH HERITAGE TOURS BEGIN IN MARSEILLE
Founded by Greek colonists from Phocaea around 600 BC, Marseille (ancient Massalia) has a long history of Jewish presence dating back 1,000 years. Today, France’s second largest city is home to about 80,000 Jews, or almost 10% of its population. This represents one of the largest Jewish populations on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, outside of Israel, with Marseille …
Lou Camin dei Anglès – Promenade des Anglais
It was called “Lou Camin dei Anglès”. In 1822, reverend Lewis Way, put a group together to raise money to level the land, at the edge of the Paillon River where the Casino Ruhl and Meyerbeer street are today and built a place to stroll by the sea. Twenty years later, a culvert or pipe on the mouth of the …
Fontaine du Soleil
What’s wrong with Apollo in the “Fontaine du Soleil” by the sculptor Alfred Auguste Janniot (1889-1969)? In legend, the ancient Greek deity Apollo, the son of Zeus, master of Olympus, rode a chariot pulled by fiery horses across the sky every day to bring light to the world. Venerated in various guises and incarnations throughout classical antiquity, radiant Apollo came …