ABCDE Travel sunday, december 19, 2010


IMPULSIVE TRAVELER


It must be Kismet Discovering the pleasures of a big town’s small museums. F6


Navigator You have a friend in the DOT. F2 What’s the Deal? Travel bargains of the week. F2


Editor’s note No Travel section next week. We’ll be back Jan. 2. CHAT We take your questions Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/travel


BEDCHECK


Southern manors Living the gracious life for a night in Southside Virginia. F3


Marseille Labelle


F EZ


PHOTOS BY PHILIPPE CONTI/PICTURETANK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Above, limestone cliffs border the harbor at Sormiou, one ofMarseille’s calanques, or sea inlets. Below, a true bouillabaisse served at Le Peron, where you eat just above the sea. The French port is having a makeover, though there’s still lots of gritty charm BY ROBERT V. CAMUTO Special to The Washington Post I What lies beneath


Subterranean bunkers preserve Berlin’s Nazi past


BY ROBERT RIGNEY Special to The Washington Post We’re several dozen feet beneath Ber-


lin, in a low-ceilinged concrete lair. The walls are marked with phosphorescent arrows, still glowing after more than 60 years, that point the way through heavy, gas-tight steel doors to other rooms in this warren of underground bunkers. This was where the residents of a


working-class Berlin neighborhood sought refuge during the air raids of 1945. The floors are strewn with rusty ammunition, guns, old boots, helmets, rations, military cots — items that offer vivid testament to wartime Berlin. Here


it’s easy to imagine the bombs thudding overhead, the city erupting in flames, families huddled together, praying for safety. Suddenly the stories that old Berliners tell about traumatic experi- ences during the allied air raids ofWorld War II come to life. “To find the real Berlin you have to go


underground,” says Dietmar Arnold, “beneath the city’s slick and modern streets, into the city’s unconscious, as it were, history’s hidden lair.” Arnold is a freelance architect and


member of an association calledBerliner Unterwelten (BerlinUnderworlds) that’s devoted to mapping out and exploring the city’s subterranean topography. For 12 years, he has been leading expeditions into the bunkers, tunnels and under- ground canals of the German capital.He believes that theBerlinundergroundhas


berlin bunkers continued on F5 BERLINER UNTERWELTEN VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS


t was about 10:30 on a Saturday night. My wife and I were driving back to our hotel in the picturesque old port of Mar- seille after a relaxing dinner at an Italian restaurant at the far edge of town. It so happened that on this


evening, Marseille’s soccer team was playing for its first league championship in 17 years, and the bars across town were packed with hordes of pastis- fueled young fans watching the match. About halfway down the port, I saw that gendarmes were blocking the road and turning away cars. Behind the road- block, hundreds of national riot police were suiting up in body armor, helmets and shields. The old port is the heart ofMarseille,


and that night, thousandswere expected to gather there to demonstrate either joy or anger at the game’s outcome. I protested to the officer who waved


us away, explaining in French that our hotelwas at the opposite end of the port. “Look,” he shot back, “there are 300


people down there smashing every car on the street. Do you really want to go there?” I turned the car around and parked in


a public garage. Then we walked briskly across the port,with its acres of pleasure boats swaying in the breeze and the riot cops lining up for a long night. As we reached the inland edge of the port, a human tide dressed inMarseille’s colors of light blue and white broke out of the bars and onto the streets and public squares.Marseille had won. Fireworks exploded, and young men


on scooters sped through pedestrian plazas and over sidewalks while others


ran through the streets chanting songs from Marseille’s soccer libretto. We hastened to the hotel and locked the door. Contrary to what the gendarme had


told us, therewas no violence that night. We awoke the next morning to an azure sky and the angelic singing of a Palm Sunday procession coming from the small white baroque Saint-Ferreol church. The procession wound through the port, past the daily morning fish market, the worshipers carrying olive branches in the Provencal tradition. Riot cops to olive branches in an


ancientMediterranean portwith amod- ern reputation as a center of organized crime:Marseille is about as authentical- ly paradoxical a place as you’ll find in Western Europe. In the past decade, France’s second-


marseille continued on F4


Abombed-out flak tower, which housed anti- aircraft guns, is among theNazi sites that survived the war. The underground “is where the people who started the SecondWorldWar died,” says preservationist Dietmar Arnold. “We had to preserve this for the next generation.”


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