Préau des Accoules - Musée des enfants de la Ville de Marseille
Eighteenth-century academy hall inside a former Jesuit observatory, now a hands-on art and heritage museum for children.
This guide to the Preau des Accoules in Marseille starts on the rooftop with Father Laval, a Jesuit with no formal training in astronomy, who in 1702 talked his fellow Jesuits into building the city's first real observatory here, backed by the royal astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini. It follows him tracing a meridian line more than eight kilometers south to a stone pyramid on a hill called Collet-de-la-Rose, and the successors, Father Pezenas among them, who kept reviving and abandoning the station after Laval left with the instruments in 1718. Stand in the courtyard and look up at the flat-vaulted hall where it all happened.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.