The publisher Emons discovered the tourisme-marseille.com site and offered me the exciting and ambitious challenge of launching the first guide in the “111” collection dedicated to Marseille. "111 places" is a series of guides covering the entire planet with a different approach to tourism, often off the beaten track, with the exploration of more intimate places or with unknown stories. After the success and the stock shortage of the first part, the release in 2023 of the new, fully updated edition with around ten new features.
This guide is the story of an unexpected encounter, a violent thunderbolt between an immigrant looking for a softer life and a welcoming land that is too often evoked by enticing shortcuts: Kalashnikov, football and sunshine rate. And as in any passionate story, there is desire, pleasure, but also sometimes rage and frustration. Marseille is thus improbable, elusive, engraved in the skin for some, hated by others. A city apart, complex, where feelings constantly collide, because city showcase of a multiple people, a gigantic territory at the same time urban, harsh, chaotic, mineral, but also soft, luminous, marine and rural.
A puzzle of 111 neighborhoods sometimes fractured and even erased by brutal urbanization from which emerge exceptional places, miraculously preserved. Writing a book about Marseille frightened me at first – and I still do: did I have the legitimacy to do so despite my blog, which is the result of thousands of explorations carried out in 10 years? My heart is in Marseille, but not my roots. But the encouragement of a local historian – “Go ahead, share your love! – convinced me.
Here, don't look for the Bonne Mère, the Mucem and the most Instagrammable spots of the moment. You will probably even ask yourself “Why? at the sight of a ruin strewn with rubbish or a facade without splendor. This story aims to evoke the many facets of Marseille in chiaroscuro, to reveal it from the South to the famous North, where rumors wrongly say not to go. Unpretentious and without clichés, it offers you old, new, dirty, grandiose places, which you think you know, where you pass indifferently while returning to certain local legends - true or false, is not a historian who wanna ! This guide was probably born with the sole desire to proclaim loud and clear in black ink “Marseille, I love you! ".
Texts and photos Dominique Milherou, creator of the tourisme-marseille.com website, 240 pages > New edition 2023 > €18
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