Montmartre and Peillon

I love my places high and my neighborhoods charming - bucolic and oozing with character, history, fine architecture, and artists. My neighborhood in New York City, the Village, certainly has many of these attributes. But to get the full package, I go to France.

My favorite indulgences are the village perché (perched villages) in the South of France - small, hilltop medieval villages. I have been obsessed with these places, at one time compiling a database of 269 of the most wonderful and cross-referencing them with my collection of books on French villages. I created database entries for comments and checkboxes to note which books recommended which villages.

Too small to find in the Michelin Map index, I laboriously located all of the villages through map exploration, tagged them in the maps, and added the map coordinates to my database for future reference. I included the official French département. The printed result became a guide for my travel to Provence, the Alpes-Maritimes, and Vaucluse.
I visited dozens of these villages, often to the chagrin of my travel companions. On one family trip, my sister was completely befuddled as to why I would do this and why anyone would want to travel that way. I think she saw it as analogous to paint by number. I like numbers and my desire to accumulate villages visited knew no bounds. My favorite is Peillon, perched in the hills, with stone houses clinging to a cliff face at 1000 feet.

There is still some artistic flavor to Greenwich Village, but most of its art history is in the past. Its legacy of beat poets, artists, musicians, writers, dancers, actors, and performers reads like a who's who of the American arts. The neighborhood has become much too expensive to really qualify as any type of artistic bohemia. However, musicians and performers are common, and occasionally, one may still see someone painting in the streets or parks of the Village.

Today's artists here typically either travel in and out of the city or are some of the few remaining beneficiaries of rent controls, living in below-market rentals.
Much of the Village has been commercialized and is heavily touristed, but no one has taken away the charm of many of the neighborhood streets and its collection of hundreds of 19th century row houses. The West Village is particularly beautiful.

In Paris, I get all this with hills (over 400 feet) in Montmartre, an area also known for its history of artists. Those who worked in or around Montmartre include Vincent van Gogh, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Modigliani, Claude Monet, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Matisse, Renoir, Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Somehow, street painters there today still seem to have a little more authenticity, but I would imagine a Parisian might see them the way we see painters in New York City - as exploiters and sellers of an artistic past to tourists.

As I stroll the Village, I head for the hills. In the distance, I think I see Montmartre and Peillon...