Saint-Sixte chapel, in the Alpilles

Romanesque architecture reshaped in the seventeenth century

The chapel was built in the twelfth century on the site of an ancient sanctuary, near a spring. The surviving Romanesque work includes the semicircular apse, built in finely laid stone and covered by a half-dome vault. The wall of the triumphal arch still bears two corbels carved in the shape of boar's heads.

The rubble-stone nave is preceded by a projecting porch, or stabulum, added in the seventeenth century. The hermitage and enclosed garden belong to the same period. Massive buttresses support the building, which is topped by a single-opening bell gable, a familiar silhouette in Provence's rural chapels.

The Easter Tuesday Roumavage

The chapel was mentioned in a papal bull by Adrian IV before 1155 and was given to the abbey of Mollégès in 1222. Every Easter Tuesday, a procession known as the Roumavage makes its way from Eygalières parish church to the chapel. Villagers, sometimes in traditional dress, gather for a Mass in Provençal in honour of Saint Sixtus. The tradition associates the pilgrimage with protection for the crops against drought.

During the plague epidemic of 1720, the hermitage served as a lazaret. In the nineteenth century, the chapel remained a place of devotion and also became a subject for painters. Behind its plain walls, local worship, pilgrimage and the memory of a time of crisis overlap.

A rural chapel that became a painter's motif

The building's isolation, the vertical lines of the cypresses and the light of the Alpilles compose a scene reduced to a few strong forms. Since the nineteenth century, painters have found here three recurring subjects of Provence: stone, evergreen trees and a southern light that changes with the hour.

Reproduced again and again, the chapel has become one of the region's best-known images, in painting as well as photography. André Derain made a painting of it. On site, the landscape is more restrained than its image suggests: a low building, a few trees, a path and the limestone horizon of the Alpilles.

Continue through the Alpilles

The journey can continue towards Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and the Antiques of Glanum, another reminder of the massif's ancient history. The Wednesday market in Saint-Rémy brings the discovery into the town's streets and squares. Near Tarascon, the Saint-Gabriel chapel offers another Romanesque building set in a rural landscape. From one end of the Alpilles to the other, these chapels show how small-scale architecture can belong so closely to the relief.