Four days in Marseille: the oldest city in France, and the least polite

Start where the Greeks did. The Vieux Port is still a working harbour with a fish market on the northern quay in the mornings, sold straight off the boats by people who are not performing for anybody, and it is ringed by cafés on both sides.

Walk up into Le Panier behind it in the late afternoon. The name means basket, the streets are narrow and steep, and the blocks between it and the water were dynamited by the German occupiers in 1943 and rebuilt afterwards, which is why the medieval plan survives with a good deal of post-war housing on it. It is now murals, small shops and a very good density of places to eat.

Come back down for dinner and a pastis on the quay, which is what everybody here does at seven.

The harbour mouth is where Marseille spent its Capital of Culture money and it worked. On the northern point, Fort Saint-Jean was built in 1660 by Louis XIV, who aimed its guns at the city rather than at the sea because Marseille had just rebelled against him. The ramparts and the garden inside are free to walk.

From the fort, a long footbridge crosses the air to the new national museum, which is a black concrete lattice box wrapped in what looks like a fishing net cast in stone. The permanent collection is about the Mediterranean as one civilisation rather than about France, and the ramp spiralling up the outside is worth doing even if you skip the exhibitions.

In the afternoon go up. Notre-Dame de la Garde stands on the highest point of the city with a gilded Virgin on the bell tower, and inside it is hung with model ships, painted plaques and life belts left by sailors and their families. The view takes in the whole coast, the islands and the hills behind. There is a bus if you would rather not climb it in the heat.

South of the harbour the Corniche runs along the water for five kilometres, on a road built in the nineteenth century partly to give the unemployed something to do. Walk or take the bus, and stop where the road crosses a gap in the cliff.

The Vallon des Auffes is underneath that bridge: a cove the width of a tennis court, packed with wooden fishing boats, with three or four restaurants around it and nothing else. It is the postcard the city does not advertise, and it is where to eat fish at lunchtime.

In the afternoon, inland and up. Le Corbusier finished the Unité d'Habitation in 1952 as a self-contained village on legs: more than three hundred apartments, a shopping street halfway up, a school, and a roof with a running track and a paddling pool on it. The locals called it the madhouse. The roof is open to walk on and the third floor has a hotel and a bar, so you can sit down in the middle of it.

Finish in the park by the sea at the end of the Corniche, which is where Marseille runs, cycles and does nothing on a Sunday.

A last morning ten minutes from the station, in the part of town that most visitors walk past. The Noailles quarter is the city's stomach: a dense grid of streets behind the main boulevard, full of Tunisian, Algerian, Comorian and Vietnamese shops, spice stalls, bread, mint by the armful and coffee drunk standing up.

Then up the slope to the Cours Julien, which is the opposite kind of place: pedestrianised, planted, covered in murals that change every few months, and lined with bars and record shops. The stairs up to it from the boulevard are themselves a mural.

Eat somewhere in between and walk to Saint-Charles, which is uphill and about fifteen minutes.