The tour will explore this rich multilayered history of the Panier and the adjacent neighborhood of Noailles. The tour will end at the Mucem (the Museum of Mediterranean Civilizations) on the edge of the Euromediterranean development project, beginning in the heart of the old Marseille and ending in the new, stopping along the way to explore the galleries and local arts and crafts, in a tour that links Marseille's past and future.

Le Panier is the oldest neighborhood in Marseille and was the site of the Greek agora when the Phoenicians founded the city 600 years before Christ. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, le Panier was home to successive waves of immigration, forming a rich multi-ethnic fabric. During World War II, half the neighborhood was decimated under the Vichy regime to smoke out a hotbed of working-class resistance. Since the 1980s the neighborhood has become home to a tapestry of colorful street art, and more recently galleries and artisans, from ceramics to fashion.

Our tour will wind our way from the Greek colonization, to resistance fighters and jazzmen to the artists and poets that flock to the neighborhood now.