Stony faced

Much of Antibes is made out of something else. For instance, the houses down the road, just beyond the Ecole Paul Arène, are made out of the stones from the ramparts which were demolished just over a century ago. But those ramparts were made, in part, from the masonry of the old amphitheatre, which can be seen in early views of the town, but which now is the locus of the bus station.

One way to tell whether Roman masonry is incorporated in newer buildings is to look at the size of the blocks - far too big for the present structures. Another is to look for the characteristic method of pinning the blocks together with iron rods and lead as cement. Many blocks in the old town have the tell-tale holes where the rods used to be. The lead, being precious, was probably scraped out assiduously.

Sometimes lintels give the game away. One of the small postern gates into the oldest part of the old town has worn epigraphy on it, but now upside down. That particular inscription is well known, and on the guided tour itineraries.

More interestingly, the two 'tours sarrazines', early medieval watchtowers built to keep an eye on the horizon for bands of raiders, are also made of the same masonry blocks. The medieval builders were only worried by the suitability of the stones for the towers they were building. It was of no importance whatsoever if they carried inscriptions or sculpture.

So, if one looks intently at the courses of highly weathered Roman dressed stone forming what is now the cathedral's belfry, one can discern now and again, fragments of script or of decoration. One of these inscriptions appears to begin the toponym 'Antipolis' (though I am a bit doubtful about this common reading - I suspect an adjectival form), a second one seems to be the end of one word and the beginning of another, and the whitish stone two brown courses up from the bottom of the bell chamber (parallel with the bottom rim of the bell), one block in from the left hand corner, appears to be a caduceus, lying on its side. Another sculptural element, also looking like a caduceus, appears faintly in the very bottom left stone in the photograph, but this time oriented vertically.

This caduceus was a sign of the Mercury cult, whereas the cathedral itself was previously a temple to Diana. Clearly by the eleventh century, nobody seemed to think the distinction mattered.