Marseille
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50 free Marseille trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Marseille is the oldest city in France and its second largest, a port founded by Greek seafarers some 2,600 years ago. It has been besieged by Romans, emptied by an epidemic, punished by revolutionaries and rebuilt after war, and it has kept its swagger through all of it. This quiz gathers the fun facts people most often look up about Marseille: where the name comes from, what the island fortress in the bay is famous for, which dishes and drinks belong to the waterfront, and how a football club and a hilltop church became symbols of the place. There are questions on history, geography, food, sport, film and famous locals. It suits travellers planning a trip to Provence, students of French culture and quiz fans who like a city with stories. The opening questions are the friendliest, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01La Marseillaise is named for volunteers from Marseille, but in which French city was the anthem written?
Strasbourg
Strasbourg is where army officer Rouget de Lisle wrote the song in 1792, as a war song for the Army of the Rhine. Marseille volunteers sang it on their march to Paris, and the nickname stuck.
Q 02Which Alexandre Dumas novel made the island prison of Château d'If, off Marseille, famous around the world?
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Count of Monte Cristo locks its hero in the Château d'If for 14 years before a daring escape. The real fortress, built in the 1520s, never had to fight off an attack.
Q 03Which French footballer, scorer of two headers in the 1998 World Cup final, grew up in Marseille's La Castellane?
Zinedine Zidane
Zinedine Zidane was born in La Castellane in 1972, the youngest of five children of Algerian parents. Both of his goals against Brazil in the final came from corner kicks.
Q 04Which Marseille fish stew began as a fishermen's meal of bony rockfish they were unable to sell?
Bouillabaisse
Bouillabaisse takes its name from two Provençal verbs meaning to boil and to lower the heat. An authentic Marseille pot must include rascasse, a spiny rockfish that lives on reefs close to shore.
Q 05What name did Greek settlers give Marseille when they founded the trading colony around 600 BC?
Massalia
Massalia became Massilia to the Romans, and the modern name most likely descends from it. The port they founded is considered the oldest city in France.
Q 06Which everyday product, made from olive oil and sea water, has Marseille produced for about 600 years?
Soap
Soap from Marseille was so prized that a royal edict of 1688 reserved the name for bars made with olive oil. The first documented maker in the port was recorded in about 1370.
Q 07Which steep, fjord-like inlets give their name to the national park lying partly inside Marseille's city limits?
Calanques
Calanques line the rugged coast between Marseille and Cassis. The national park created around them in 2012 is mostly sea: only about a sixth of its area is dry land.
Q 08Which Swiss-born architect gave Marseille the Unité d'Habitation, a housing block with a rooftop paddling pool?
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier finished the block in 1952 with shops, a hotel and wide corridors nicknamed streets in the sky. It joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016.
Q 09Which animal, a gift from Portugal's king to the Pope, stopped on Marseille's island of If in 1516?
Rhinoceros
The rhinoceros drew many visitors to the island, King Francis I among them. Its ship later sank off Italy, and Albrecht Dürer made his famous woodcut without ever seeing the animal.
Q 10Which hilltop basilica, crowned by a gilded Madonna and Child, do Marseille locals call the Good Mother?
Notre-Dame de la Garde
Notre-Dame de la Garde stands on the highest natural point in Marseille, a 149-metre limestone outcrop. Its statue, made of copper covered in gold leaf, is 11.2 metres tall.
Q 11Which anise-flavoured aperitif, first sold by Paul Ricard in 1932, is especially popular in Marseille?
Pastis
Pastis appeared some 17 years after France banned absinthe. Unlike its predecessor it contains no wormwood, and takes its flavour mainly from star anise and liquorice root.
Q 12In 1993 Olympique de Marseille became the first French club to win which European trophy, at a final in Munich?
Champions League
Champions League glory came through a single headed goal by defender Basile Boli just before half-time. No other French club lifted the trophy until Paris Saint-Germain in 2025.
Q 13Which cold, dry wind brings clear skies to Marseille, one of the sunniest cities in France?
Mistral
Q 21Which garlic sauce is served in Marseille with boiled fish, hard-boiled eggs and cooked vegetables?
Aïoli
Aïoli means garlic and oil in Provençal. Some cooks add egg yolk and lemon juice, which brings it close to a garlic mayonnaise, while others leave the egg out altogether.
Q 22Which painter from nearby Aix painted many views of the bay from his room at L'Estaque, on Marseille's edge?
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne recorded the changing seasons and the shifting light over the water at L'Estaque. Auguste Renoir, Georges Braque and Raoul Dufy also painted in the same little port.
Q 23Which French film star played a veteran mayor in Marseille, the first French-language Netflix original series?
Gérard Depardieu
Mistral means masterly in Occitan, and the wind can blow for several days at a time, mostly in winter and spring. It also helps make Marseille the driest major city in France.
Q 14Which disease killed about half of Marseille's people after the ship Grand-Saint-Antoine docked in 1720?
Plague
Plague arrived from the Levant aboard the ship, in what proved Western Europe's last major outbreak of the disease. A dry-stone wall two metres high was built across the countryside to contain it.
Q 15Ancient Marseille lost its independence in 49 BC after backing the losing side against which Roman general?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar confiscated most of the port's trading empire but let it keep nominal autonomy, out of respect for its old friendship with Rome. He left the siege itself to his legate Trebonius.
Q 16Which Marseille-born forward won four Premier League titles at Manchester United, his collar turned up?
Eric Cantona
Eric Cantona grew up a fan of Olympique de Marseille and joined the club in 1988 for a French record fee. His four English titles came in the space of five years.
Q 17Which cards, used for both games and fortune-telling, have a classic 78-card pattern named after Marseille?
Tarot
Tarot packs in the Marseille pattern were very popular for card games in 17th- and 18th-century France. The oldest surviving examples were made in the port in 1639.
Q 18Which title did Marseille hold in 2013, the year its waterfront museum MuCEM opened beside Fort Saint-Jean?
European Capital of Culture
European Capital of Culture status, shared with Košice in Slovakia, brought more than 900 events to Marseille and nearby towns, plus over 600 million euros of new cultural buildings.
Q 19Which sport of the Paris 2024 Olympics held all of its races far from the capital, at Marseille's marina?
Sailing
Sailing ran from 28 July to 8 August in the waters off Marseille. The Stade Vélodrome also staged Olympic football matches that summer.
Q 20Which boules game, born in nearby La Ciotat, holds its best-known tournament in Marseille every year?
Pétanque
Pétanque takes its name from pieds tanqués, feet planted, because players throw from a standing start inside a circle. The annual Marseille tournament draws more than 10,000 players.
Gérard Depardieu's character, Robert Taro, was inspired by the real long-serving mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, who dubbed him the other mayor. The show ran for two seasons from 2016.
Q 24Besides Paris and Marseille, which French city, the country's third largest, is split into arrondissements?
Lyon
Lyon has nine arrondissements, Marseille 16 and Paris 20. Marseille's are grouped in pairs into eight sectors, each with its own mayor and council.
Q 25Désirée Clary, a Marseille silk merchant's daughter once engaged to Napoleon, became queen of which country?
Sweden
Sweden gained its Marseille-born queen in 1818, when her husband took the throne as Charles XIV John. Her sister Julie married Napoleon's brother Joseph and became queen of Spain.
Q 26Marseille's founders set out around 600 BC from which ancient Greek city on the coast of modern Turkey?
Phocaea
Phocaea stood where the Turkish town of Foça is now, and Marseille is still nicknamed the Phocaean city. Its people also founded Empúries in Spain and Velia in Italy.
Q 27Marseille's grand avenue, the Canebière, takes its name from which rope-making plant long traded in the port?
Hemp
Hemp is cannabis in Latin, and the avenue's Provençal name, Canabiera, grew out of that word. The kilometre-long street has been called the Champs-Élysées of Marseille.
Q 28Which French king built two forts at the mouth of Marseille's Old Port with their cannons aimed at the town?
Louis XIV
Louis XIV ordered the forts of Saint-Jean and Saint-Nicolas after the townspeople rose against their governor. The guns were there to control Marseille, not to defend it from the sea.
Q 29Marseille-born playwright Edmond Rostand wrote which 1897 play about a swordsman-poet with a famously large nose?
Cyrano de Bergerac
Cyrano de Bergerac was a triumph at its premiere and brought the word panache into English. Its hero had been a boyhood idol of Rostand, who was born into a wealthy Marseille family.
Q 30Which Mediterranean island, the birthplace of Napoleon, is linked to Marseille by ferry?
Corsica
Corsica has close ties with Marseille, which is home to the second-largest Corsican community in France. Napoleon was born on the island at Ajaccio.