Marseille wears 26 centuries in layers: a Greek port dug up under a shopping centre, Roman wine jars still on their quay, an abbey older than France, and a quarter the Nazis dynamited. This route reads them in order.
Europe's largest city-history museum was built over the Greek port unearthed in 1967: Hellenistic ramparts, a 3rd-century BC quarry dock and a Roman wreck raised from the mud. Open 9:00–18:00, closed Mondays.
Thirty-three enormous dolia storage jars sit exactly where 1st-century AD dockers left them, revealed when 1943 demolition rubble was cleared. It is the only Roman commercial warehouse in Europe preserved in situ.
Founded around 415 AD by John Cassian on a Hellenistic quarry and early Christian necropolis, this fortified abbey hides 5th-century sarcophagi, martyrs' catacombs and the black Madonna paraded each Candlemas.
The striped Byzantine-Romanesque Major (1852–1893) devoured most of the 12th-century Vieille Major standing beside it. A few steps south, Saint-Laurent, the fishermen's parish, keeps its plain Provençal Romanesque nave.
François I's 1531 island fortress never repelled an invasion but jailed Protestants, Revolutionaries and Communards — and, in fiction, Edmond Dantès. Prisoners' carved graffiti still scars the cell walls.
Inside a German blockhouse under the Tourette, this memorial documents the January 1943 round-up, when 20,000 residents were expelled and the Vieux-Port's north bank was dynamited on Vichy's orders.
Espérandieu's 1862–1869 colonnade celebrates the Canal de Marseille, which finally brought Durance water to a city gutted by cholera. Bulls and tigers surge from the château d'eau; the left wing holds the fine arts collection.
This triumphal arch, begun 1825 for the Duc d'Angoulême's Spanish campaign, stands where the Roman road to Aix left town. The Belsunce quarter around it has absorbed every Mediterranean migration since Napoleon III.
Pierre Puget's 1671–1749 almshouse locked up the city's poor behind three arcaded storeys around a baroque oval chapel. Slum-condemned, then flagged by Le Corbusier in 1951, it now holds Mediterranean archaeology and African art.
The daily market that has fed every arriving generation since 1900: Comorian, Algerian, Armenian and Vietnamese stalls, plus Maison Empereur on Rue des Récolettes, France's oldest hardware shop, trading since 1827.
Le Corbusier's 1947–1952 answer to war housing shortages: 337 flats on pilotis, an interior shopping street on level three, and a rooftop gymnasium. UNESCO-listed in 2016; locals nicknamed it la Maison du Fada.
A rope-makers' inlet wedged beneath the Corniche viaduct, still lined with cabanons and pointu boats. Above it, Gaston Castel's 1927 memorial to the Army of the Orient frames the open sea through a hollow arch.