* France Mediterranean civilisations museum feted as turning point for Marseille French city still notorious for gun crime and drug smuggling welcomes opening of Mucem -- * Email * Angelique Chrisafis in Marseille * * theguardian.com, Monday 3 June 2013 18.45 BST -- The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, by architect Rudy Ricciotti. Photograph: Patrick Aventurier/Getty Photograph: 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 â an audacious new architectural emblem for a port city desperate to shake off its stereotypes as the French capital of Kalashnikovs, gang wars, drug-smuggling, political corruption and football mania. After more than a decade of delays and political wrangling, Tuesday will see the grand opening by François Hollande of Mucem, France's new Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations. The â¬191m project is the first museum in the world dedicated to Mediterranean civilisations and culture, and the first standalone French "national museum" ever to be located outside the centralised cultural grandeur of 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 stabbing since January and various sleaze investigations including a popular local Socialist MP recently given a jail sentence for buying 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 year, is a celebration of a cosmopolitan, ethnically mixed city, proud that its housing estates did not erupt in riots like the Paris suburbs in 2005. But although it doesn't have the ghettoes of Paris, it has more unemployment and poverty. For years, as the symbolic Mucem project snaked its way through the highest levels of the French state, from the Socialist government of 2000 that conceived it as a return of national culture to the provinces, via Nicolas Sarkozy, who saw it as a symbol of his ill-fated political "Mediterranean union", the question has been, what would actually be displayed inside. -- Central to the rebelliousness of the project was the building's provocative designer, Rudy Ricciotti, the enfant terrible of French architecture. Born in Algeria, the French architect said he carried the Mediterranean curse of perpetual travel, "a fracture which never 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 first time. 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 stare. Culture is an element of peaceâmaking." Daily Email close -- Close this popup 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 2013.