LA VIEILLE CHARITE, MARSEILLE – FRANCE

La Vielle Charite is a former of almshouse, now functioning as a museum and cultural cenre. It is situated in the centre of the old Panier quarter of Marseille in the south of France. Constructed between 1671 and 1749 in the Baroque style to the designs of the architect Pierre Puget, it comprises four ranges of arcaded galleries in three storeys surrounding a space with a central chapel surmounted by an ovoid dome.

The almshouses served as workhouses for beggars before.  During the French Revolution, the building was used as an asylum for “les vagabonds et les gens sans aveu” (vagrants and the dispossessed) in the nineteenth century. It was transformed into a barracks for the French Foreign Legion until 1922, when it was used to lodge those displaced by the demolition of the district behind the Bourse and later those made homeless by the dynamiting of the Old Port during the Second World War.

In 1962, all the residents were rehoused and the building shut down. It was only in 1968, thanks to the intervention of the Minister of Culture Andre Malraux, that funds became available to rescue the buildings, by then in a state of total dereliction. La Vielle Charite was painstaking restored to its former glory between 1970 and 1986, restoration of the chapel being completed in 1981.

Nowadays, La Vieille Charite houses a number of different cultural and educational resources:

1.           The Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology, on the 1^st floor, covering oriental and classical antiquities, as well as local Celto-Ligurian archaeology.
2.           The Museum of Art of Africa, Oceania and Amerindia, on the 2th floor, containing an unusually collection of artifacts, including masks from Mexico and West Africa and a unique collection of engraved human skulls and trophy heads from South America.
3.           A research library specializing in archaeological documents.
4.           A school of advanced studies in the social sciences (EHESS).
5.          Offices of the Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique.
6.           On the ground level there are special temporary exhibitions as well as a number of museum shops.