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Mediterranean civilisations museum feted as turning point for Marseille

   French city still notorious for gun crime and drug smuggling welcomes
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     * Angelique Chrisafis in Marseille
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     * theguardian.com, Monday 3 June 2013 18.45 BST
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   Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images

   At the mouth of Marseille's old port, against the blue of the
   Mediterranean sits a mysterious dark cube draped in a giant concrete
   net – an audacious new architectural emblem for a port city desperate
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   Paris.

   Mucem is not just the centrepiece of Marseille's 2013 stint as European
   capital of culture, which aims to attract 10 million visitors this
   year, despite the bad press over six gangland gun deaths and one fatal
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   votes.

   Marseille won the capital of culture tag by arguing that the real
   cultural questions facing Europe today were "migration, racism, gender
   relations, religion, ecology". Mucem, which aims for 300,000 visitors a
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   heals".

   The museum is built on Marseille's disused pier, where migrants often
   had their first glimpse of the city, and a rooftop walkway links it to
   the 17th-century Fort Saint-Jean, open to the public for the
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   Ricciotti described his building full of dappled, fragmented light as a
   "vertical kasbah", an "architecture of resistance against imperialist
   mythology". He said it would restore calm to Marseille after the city
   had taken such a whipping in the national media in recent years.

   The architect said: "The whole world directs hatred at Marseille, it's
   like a kind of Quasimodo, it takes hit after hit and just smiles back,
   it doesn't understand the hatred so it just replies with an enigmatic
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   Mediterranean civilisations museum feted as turning point for Marseille
   This article was published on the Guardian website at 18.45 BST on
   Monday 3 June 2013. It was last modified at 00.00 BST on Tuesday 4 June