The Alpilles Museum - Saint Rémy de Provence
Ethnology and popular arts

The Alpilles museum, created in 1919, is set up in a former private town mansion from the Renaissance classed as a Historic Monument, the Hotel Mistral de Montdragon. Of great architectural quality, the building has a remarkable interior courtyard.
Its collections are divided into four sections: archaeology, natural sciences, ethnology and graphic and photographic arts.

A promenade in time and space, its permanent exhibition has been conceived with the objective of helping to understand, and respect, the present day landscapes, natural and human, of the part of Provence between the Rhône, the Durance river and the southern limits of the Alpilles mountain chain. It evokes the diverse facets of the region's heritage: old fauna (fossiles) and existing (cicadas), exploitation of the subsoil (quarries and pottery), thousand year old agricultural and trade activities (olives, grapevines, cereal, sheep) and more recent (teasel, seeds, fruit and vegetables), costumes and traditional festivals, Camargue type bullfights.

The graphic and photographic arts exhibition room, as well as the typography and engraving workshop, expresses the establishment's new orientation towards works on paper and contemporary engraving.

The Alpilles Museum is a museum of society. It's cited discipline is ethnology. One of its major concerns consists in the development of popular arts.

Pierre de Brun, creator of the Alpilles Museum and passionate archaeologist.