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Few places in France carry as much sensory weight as Provence. The light here has a particular quality that painters have chased for centuries, a warm, flattening brightness that turns limestone villages gold in the afternoon and makes the shadows between lavender rows almost violet. That quality of light, combined with a landscape that shifts from the Alpilles and the Luberon to the coastal garrigue above Cassis, gives the region a physical character that resists easy summary. It is a large territory, stretching from the Rhône delta in the west to the edges of the Alpes-Maritimes in the east, and the differences between its parts are as instructive as what they share.

Avignon anchors the western reach of the region with a weight that is partly papal and partly theatrical. The Palais des Papes, the largest Gothic palace in the world, dominates the old city behind its medieval walls, and the annual theatre festival that bears the city's name has made it a reference point for the performing arts across Europe. From Avignon, the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape lie barely twenty minutes to the north, their distinctive large-pebbled soils producing some of the most celebrated red wines in the southern Rhône. A full-day guided tour of Provence departing from Avignon covers the kind of ground that rewards a slower pace, moving between market towns, ochre cliffs, and the dry upland plateaux of the Luberon, where villages like Gordes and Roussillon have become synonymous with a particular idea of Provençal life.