The Roof Terrace
Rudy Ricciotti (born 1952) · 2013
Take the ramps up. They wind around the outside of the glass box in the shade of the lattice, and after several turns you come out on the roof, with the concrete lace now above your head, the fort and the footbridge in front of you, the striped cathedral of La Major behind, and the open sea on the western side stretching out to the islands of the Frioul and the Château d'If. It is the best free viewpoint in the city, and you do not need a museum ticket to reach it.
Stand under the lattice and look up: the pattern casts shadows across the terrace that shift all afternoon, and through the holes you catch pieces of sky and sea. Ricciotti said he wanted the visitor to arrive on the roof a little dazed, like a diver coming up for air. The restaurant here is run by the Marseille chef Gérald Passedat, whose three star restaurant Le Petit Nice lies along the coast, and the terrace tables are a good place to watch the ferries slide out past the fort toward Corsica and North Africa. In summer the museum uses the roof for open air film screenings and evening events.
The view is also a history lesson. To your right is the Panier, the oldest quarter of Marseille, where the Greeks landed in about six hundred BC. In front, the channel that every ship has used ever since. To the left, the new docks of La Joliette built in the nineteenth century for steamers to the colonies, and beyond them the cranes of the modern port. Nowhere else lets you see twenty six centuries of the city in a single turn of the head.
Did You Know? The ramps wind around the building for several hundred metres, and they were designed so gently that the climb to the roof never feels steep.
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