Popes' houses

I learnt something about papal architecture by stumbling across the palais des papes on my first night in Avignon, trying to find my hotel in the high-sided medieval streets. It startled me in exactly the same way as the first time I went to read in the Vatican; it gives the impression that you've just been dropped into a place where everyone is two or three times as tall as you. Windows are very high, and the gap between stories huge, but it's all done to scale as if it were just natural. You imagine walking in and having to clamber up the stairs like a toddler. I assume the effect is entirely intentional. I wonder if it's because in Italy and France they had Roman remains about to give them ideas. When the Anglo-Saxons came across Roman ruins they famously called them enta geweorc, the works of giants, even though they knew their history perfectly well. In Arles, which I went to for a day, they have a huge amphitheatre, apparently one of the best preserved surviving. Roman Arles also had a large theatre, and a circus for chariot racing; but in the middle ages a substantial proportion of the dwindled population moved into the amphitheatre and used it as a fortress, dismantling the top storey and building watchtowers with it. There were over 200 houses, three streets, and two chapels inside the arena when it was cleared in the nineteenth century. It's a complete shift in scale from the Roman period.

Here is a picture of one of the watchtowers built in the middle ages to defend the amphitheatre-fortress. (Now it's used for the sort of bull-fighting where they don't kill, but just annoy the bull.)