Bronze beauty at Museum of the Civilisations of Europe in Marseilles

EVEN when the fad for Provence was at its height a few years ago, no one paid much attention to Marseilles.

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EVEN when the fad for Provence was at its height a few years ago and everyone seemed to be writing about moving there and getting in touch with a more authentic way of life, no one paid much attention to Marseilles. However romantic a reputation the region enjoyed, its capital was still imagined as a run-down and crime-ridden port city with little to recommend it.

In fact, Marseilles has always deserved better than that. It was founded by Greek settlers from Phocaea in the seventh century BC — the westernmost point of Hellenic colonial expansion — only slightly later than the eighth century colonies in Sicily such as Syracuse and roughly at the same time as Naples. And with that other great Greek city to the south — if always on a rather smaller scale — it shares the rare distinction of having remained an important centre from antiquity down to the present day.

Such continuity is particularly remarkable when we consider the fate of Athens and Rome, each reduced to shadows or skeletons of their ancient glory, while other places that grew to importance in the medieval period, such as London or Paris, were only small towns in Roman times. But while cities that wither away leave their monuments behind as ruins, in those that survive as thriving and dynamic centres for 2½ millennia almost all traces of the past tend to disappear in the constant cycle of rebuilding.

Thus, as in Naples, there is hardly any trace of the ancient city visible at first sight. Yet even when every building has been demolished and replaced many times across the centuries, the rebuilding tends on each occasion to follow the same footprint. The principle is the same as that cited by David Hume, the 18th-century philosopher, when he discussed whether we should consider a ship in which every timber had been successively replaced across time as the same ship. The science of the time did not yet recognise that this is also exactly what happens with the cells that make up our bodies.

Thus the most enduring thing in old cities, as long as they have been continuously inhabited, tends to be the pattern of blocks and streets and squares; even a cursory glance at a city plan can usually show us where the ancient or medieval core was and where the early modern and modern extensions have been added. But the original plan often survives best in smaller towns, for larger ones are more subject to ambitious urbanistic initiatives, opening modern roads and squares through the tangle of smaller streets.

In Marseilles there have been several such interventions, starting in the Renaissance and culminating in the roads designed by Georges-Eugene Haussmann at the same time that he was reshaping Paris so radically.

Nonetheless, parts of the city have escaped the effects of modernisation, including the Place de Lenche, which was once the agora or marketplace of the Greek city and perhaps for that reason is still filled with locals rather than tourists, who congregate in cafes on the waterfront. The area around and behind this square, known as the Panier, remained tightly built, with narrow and picturesque roads running between tall houses. The combination once again recalls Naples, only there the streets seem narrower because the tenements are taller and the whole experience is more extreme and verging on the nightmarish, whereas in Marseilles there is more light and air. It would have been easy, however, to disappear into the ancient labyrinthine fabric of this quarter, and indeed in 1943 a whole section of it was dynamited by the Nazis, frustrated at their inability to root out the resistance fighters and Jews who found refuge there.

More recently, there has been a concerted effort to improve life in Marseilles, especially with investment in infrastructure, and the new trams look almost too modern as they glide through the well-worn streets, where washing hangs out the windows in a way that can look picturesque when one is in the right frame of mind. But the most conspicuous improvement has been in the redesigning of Fort Saint-Jean, once the fort of the Knights Hospitalier but since reconstructed, and its surrounding docks.

The latest reworking of the old fort is very effective, with a vast area of former dockland opened as public space and extraordinary views from the castle over the harbour, the city and the open sea. In the middle of this space an ambitious new museum has been created in a striking building that seems to float on the water. The Museum of the Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean, inaugurated in June last year, is the first great national museum to be established in France since the Musee du Quai Branly (2006), devoted to tribal arts, and replacing the Musee de l’homme.

MuCEM is also the first national museum to be created outside Paris, thus acknowledging the special status of Marseilles as the nation’s Mediterranean capital, as well as demonstrating the willingness of the government to invest in cultural as well as physical infrastructure. Indeed, this is only the most visible of several cultural projects, for the Vieille Charite, the 17th-century paupers’ hospital and one of the city’s great buildings, also has been restored to house the archeological collections and to host temporary exhibitions of modern art, such as one devoted to the face in modern and contemporary art. The city’s modern art museum, the Cantini, is undergoing restoration as well.

There is no doubt, though, that MuCEM is the most spectacular initiative, with its permanent display on the ground floor and two temporary exhibitions upstairs, one of which is singularly suited to the museum’s vocation of tracing connections between the civilisations of the great sea — to borrow the title of David Abulafia’s study of the subject (2011).

The items in The Splendours of Volubilis: Ancient Bronzes from Morocco and the Mediterranean, on loan from the Rabat Archeological Museum in Morocco, are from the palace of Juba II, whose father, Numidian king Juba I, was defeated by Julius Caesar. The boy was raised in Rome and received the finest Greek and Roman education, growing up to be a remarkable scholar and the author of numerous books. He was married to Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and was a close friend of Augustus, who sent him back to Numidia to rule his hereditary kingdom under Roman tutelage. Juba’s son Ptolemy, who succeeded him, thus continued the ancient line of the Hellenistic rulers of Egypt until he was murdered in AD40 on the orders of Caligula.

Juba and his Greco-Roman wife represented by birth and education an anthology of Mediterranean cultural traditions, and at his palace at Volubilis he assembled a fine collection of sculpture representing a range of styles from refined late-classical idealism to the striking realism of an old fisherman who could come straight from the vivid portrait of two such old men in a poem formerly ascribed to Theocritus.

Most striking of all, however, is an outstanding bronze bust of the king as a young man, looking downwards to one side with a mixture of youthful vigour and almost melancholy thoughtfulness. He is clean-shaven with wavy hair swept back — like so many Hellenistic monarchs following the style set by Alexander — yet there are subtle but unmistakable traces of his Berber heritage in his features, so that the work is a poignant document of the constant process of exchange, assimilation and tensions between ethnicities and cultures that has characterised the history of the Mediterranean for thousands of years.

The permanent collection downstairs is intended to deal with similar themes of exchange, with a stress on diversity clearly meant to speak to the population of a city that has always been one of the most varied in France. Four themes have been chosen as fundamental contributions that Mediterranean civilisations have made to the world: agriculture and the development of cereal crops; the ideas of citizenship and human rights; the invention of monotheistic religion, with a focus on Jerusalem as the common sacred city of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and the seafaring that took these and other Euro-Mediterranean achievements all over the world.

The weaknesses of the museological conception are immediately apparent in the agriculture section, which, though full of fascinating objects, is impossible to read in any coherent manner. A deliberate choice, we are told, was made to avoid chronological sequence or geographical order, and pieces of contemporary art are scattered around, adding further layers of suggestion but doing nothing for clarity of narration. One has the impression that the display has been conceived with school groups in mind, perhaps as a series of prompts for commentary, although when I was there an unfortunate guide was doing her best to capture the interest of a crowd of desultory teenagers mostly talking to each other or looking at their smartphones.

The section on citizenship is particularly inadequate, with an almost unbelievably weak and patchy coverage of the beginning of democracy in Athens and republican institutions in Rome, overshadowed by a video of contemporary women talking about what citizenship means to them, a bit of the Berlin Wall and a scattering of contemporary items on subjects such as AIDS. The display seems to address an attention span trained by television, social media and news soundbites to time out after a few seconds.

The section on religions was obviously designed to be anodyne and inclusive, and its only possible use could be to insinuate to adherents of three systems of belief notorious for detesting each other that they are all related and should play nicely together. But the more you think about it, the less plausible it seems to present monotheism as a truly Mediterranean idea at all; it is perhaps more useful to understand it as a foreign element that came out of the desert, far from the sea, and invaded a much older world.

And what happened to the humanism and rationalism that emerged in Greece and underpinned democracy as well as literature, history, philosophy and science? These ideas have radically transformed the life led by all human beings on this planet — indeed they have created the modern world. But they have always had a tense relationship with the religions given so much prominence here. Unfortunately the museum seems dedicated to a baby-food version of history, stripped of the conflicts that have always made the dynamism of Western civilisation.

Mediterranean Gallery (permanent exhibition); The Splendours of Volubilis, to August 25

Museum of the Civili sations of Europe and the Mediterranean, Marseilles, France