In the rugged Pyrenees and the deep gorges of the Rhône, Stephan Wilkinson glimpses Europe's evolution from prehistoric caves to postmodern pilgrims

To most travelers, the south of France means Provence—the lovely but clichéd lavender region, a fount of adoring memoirs and one long favored by British expats fleeing clammy weather. My wife and I instead took one of our children to a different south of France, one rich in Roman history, and at times more Spanish than French and more Catalan than either. It's the land of Languedoc and Roussillon, of ancient fishing villages and medieval fortress towns, a mountain-rippled world of ruined forts, restored castles, deep river gorges, and untrafficked roads perfect for a Maserati Quattroporte—the rarest and the most distinctive of all luxury sedans.

Day 1: Barcelona to Molitg-les-Bains
Barcelonans stay up late and get up even later. Starbucks doesn't open until nine here, so we put our 400-horsepower Italian sprinter into rush-hour traffic at ten in the morning on a bumper-to-bumper highway—not the ideal place to try to make friends with a $125,000 supercar. At Figueres, we peel off and head seaward, toward the Costa Brava. The empty secondary road winds over the coastal mountains through morning fog, and as we crest the hills, suddenly we're in a stubby-treed Mediterranean landscape.

We know we're in twenty-first-century tourist country when a one-stop-shopping store sign reads INTERNET FAX SCOOTERS BIKES. We're in Cadaqués, once the summer home of Salvador Dalí—his house at the little cove of Port Lligat is now a fantastic museum. He remains the local hero, even though by the twilight of his strange career, he seemed to be better at getting the girls to undress poolside at parties here than at painting. I should be so lucky. The Costa Brava is deserted in mid-autumn—so shuttered and silent that it could be a film set after the shoot has wrapped. The contorted two-lane winding along the coastal mountains must be a misery in the summer, but our only blockage, briefly, is a snail-like camper with the painted boast, in German, TOO OLD TO WORK, TOO YOUNG TO DIE, JUST RIGHT TO TRAVEL.

Far below, the railroad bores resolutely through every inconvenient escarpment in a straight line along the coast, but our road twists and turns to laboriously cross every ridgeline, climbing and descending constantly. In places we can plainly see the road half a mile ahead, across a deep declivity, but it will take ten miles of driving to get there.

Everything flattens out when we get to sea level at Argelès, in France. When we turn inland on the D-612 at Elne, we're immediately in wine country, and vineyards replace stunted shrubs.

Day 2: Molitg-les-Bains to Villefranche-de-Conflent and back
Rudyard Kipling was a Rolls-Royce guy, but he would have loved the Maserati. We follow Kip-ling's tracks up the steep, narrow, un-guardrailed road to Vernet-les-Bains, a spa town on the slopes of the Pyrenees that he and many other Brits fancied. The Maser feels double-wide, since the few other vehicles we meet are all Peugeot and Renault microcars.