France's oldest city looks south, to the Mediterranean, more than north to Paris. Its art is in its light, its port and its concrete.
The museum of the civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean, in Rudy Ricciotti's concrete-lace cube, connected by a footbridge to Fort Saint-Jean.
Le Corbusier's 1952 unité d'habitation, a vertical village with a shopping street on the third floor and an art centre (MaMo) on the roof.
Modern art in a 17th-century mansion: Surrealism, Fauvism and the painters who came through Marseille.
A former tobacco factory turned into a cultural village of studios, exhibition halls, a theatre and a huge rooftop terrace.
Old-master painting inside the Palais Longchamp, a monumental 1869 water tower and fountain celebrating the canal that brought water to the city.
A 17th-century almshouse by Pierre Puget around a chapel with an oval dome. Museums of Mediterranean archaeology and of African, Oceanic and Amerindian art.
Rooms, ruins and curiosities: the city's other museum.
Hundreds of small painted ex-votos hung in thanks for shipwrecks survived, fires escaped and illnesses cured: a folk-art museum of Marseille's fears.
One of France's oldest Christian sites, with 4th-century sarcophagi in the crypts.
An 18th-century bastide by the sea, now a museum of decorative arts, fashion and ceramics, in a park running down to the beaches.
A fishing port tucked under the coastal road, with wooden pointus boats and two restaurants. It looks like a painting because people have painted it for 150 years.
Stefano Boeri's building of 2013, with a long cantilever reaching out over a pool of seawater. Underneath, the Cosquer Méditerranée recreates a painted Palaeolithic cave whose entrance is now under the sea.
A collector couple's townhouse of 1873, left with its tapestries, furniture, instruments and paintings as if they had just stepped out.
Cézanne's studio at Les Lauves and the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 30 minutes away.
The fishing village where Cézanne, Braque and Dufy painted the bay; 20 minutes by train.
About an hour by train: see the Arles city guide.
Mucem at opening → footbridge to Fort Saint-Jean → Le Panier and La Vieille Charité → lunch by the Vieux-Port → bus up to Notre-Dame de la Garde → sunset at the Vallon des Auffes.