The story
The Calvet Museum owes its existence to a single Avignon doctor. Esprit Calvet, an 18th-century physician who also collected coins, antiquities and books, left everything to his city when he died in 1810, and the museum opened on that bequest the following year.
It settled into the Hôtel de Villeneuve-Martignan, an elegant Provençal town house of the 1700s with a cool inner courtyard, and the collection kept the wide-ranging curiosity of its founder. Under one roof you move from Egyptian and Greek antiquities and Roman marbles to French and Italian painting, past rooms of faience, tapestry and wrought iron, and even ethnographic objects from Africa and Oceania.
The house and its garden are as much a reason to step in off the Avignon street as any single picture on the walls.
