Visit Pont du Gard by Mouse
Pont du Gard is another place we visited that is not a town. It is what is left of a Roman aquaduct located in the department of Gard
near the city of
Nimes in Provence in the south of France. And what is left of this structure is very imposing indeed.
A
UNESCO World Heritage Site, it was built in the middle of the first century to carry water to the city of Nimes. This city
was where the fabric called
denim was originally made. The cloth was known to come from Nimes, de Nimes, in French,
anglised to denim.
We visited in 2002. We were in a campground in
Avignon and our neighbor from Britain who had visited
the Pont du Gard told us about it and praised it so lavishly that we decided to stop and see it on our way north. We were not
disappointed. The part of the structure that is left spans the Gard River. You first see it from a distance and it keeps
looming larger and larger as you approach. When you are very near it is huge. The blocks of brown stone it is made of
are extremely large as are the arches. And it is a pleasure to look at. One cannot help feeling great respect for the
professional skill and sense of design that its Roman builders possessed.
This is what we wrote about our visit: "First, the
aqueduct. This is an amazingly large and beautiful segment of a part of the aquaduct built in the first century to carry water to
the Roman city which is now called Nimes. (This city, by the way, is the namesake for the cloth that bluejeans are made from. The
Levi-Strauss company imported the cloth for other purposes, and used it to make work clothes. De Nimes means " from (de) Nimes", where
the cloth was woven. It was shortened to denim in America.) Anyway, the aquaduct is stunning. It is hard to believe how long ago it
was built, how amazingly well engineered, and how huge it was."
