Le Panier: The Oldest Quarter

Ombrière du Vieux-Port

Norman Foster's mirrored canopy on the quay, 22 by 48 metres of polished steel reflecting the port.

You are standing under the Ombrière, the mirrored canopy Norman Foster designed for 2013, the year Marseille was European Capital of Culture. Look straight up. The ceiling is polished stainless steel, 22 by 48 metres, held 6 metres above the quay on eight slender posts, and it turns the whole port upside down: boats, masts, seagulls, and your own tilted face. The roof is about 120 steel panels, polished to a mirror on the underside, and on a clear day the reflection reads like a second harbour with the water hanging overhead.

The canopy does a practical job too. It shades the fish market that sets up here each morning and the queue for the boat to the Frioul islands. It opened in March 2013 and took locals a while to warm to; today it is the usual meeting point on the quay. When you are ready, turn your back to the water and walk toward the town hall ahead.

Hôtel de Ville

The 17th-century town hall on the quay, Marseille's first baroque building, still called la Loge by locals.

The Hôtel de Ville stands right on the quay, its stone façade turned toward the water. Work began in 1653 and the building was occupied in 1673. The architect Gaspard Puget, brother of the sculptor Pierre Puget, drew it up with Mathieu Portal, and the design owes a lot to the palaces of Genoa. Marseille traded heavily with that city, and the style arrived with the cargo.

Pierre Puget himself carved just one thing here: the escutcheon of the arms of France above the main door. The original now hangs in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, and a copy by Stanislas Clastrier sits on the façade. There is no grand staircase inside; the ground floor belonged to the merchants' lodge, the first floor to the consuls, and a stone gallery at the back links the two. This is one of the few old buildings that survived the dynamiting of the quarter in 1943.

Now turn inland toward the hill and find the steps of the Montée des Accoules.