Trip to Perigord: we discover Montaigne with Ignasi Aragay

BarcelonaFive days and four nights to soak up the landscapes of vineyards, walnut groves, the winding meanders of the Dordogne River, and the region's rich gastronomy. This is the journey proposed by the newspaper ARA, led by deputy editor Ignasi Aragay, author of the Diccionari Montaigne. A getaway to the Périgord, where Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) lived and died, the humanist we would all want by our side, the sage who speaks to us like a friend, with plain and direct language, and with absolute freedom.

The trip will consist of five days and four nights. Apart from Montaigne Castle, we will go to the Abbey of Sainte Marie de Fontfreda, to the spectacular clipped boxwood gardens of Marqueyssac, to the caves with prehistoric paintings of Lascaux, and to Beynac Castle. We will also navigate by gabarre on the Dordogne and visit the Noyeraies du Lander, where we will have a walnut oil tasting.

Montaigne's Essays were a pillar even in his lifetime and have continued to shape Western thought to this day. In Catalan, Josep Pla and Joan Fuster considered him a reference. The medieval tower where the author wrote and wrote himself, where he experimented, still stands. In the upstairs room, on the wooden beams of the ceiling, phrases from his admired Greco-Latin authors, which he had engraved there himself to feel well accompanied, can still be contemplated.

Visiting the castle is a way to understand him better, an invitation to the immense pleasure of reading and rereading him. Montaigne thought of himself without limits. More than four centuries later, he continues to help us understand ourselves and the world. "Each man carries within him the complete form of the human condition," wrote that aristocrat who knew that, "certainly, man is an extraordinarily vain, contradictory, and fluctuating subject".

Consult the program by days and the conditions of the trip here.