Hiking and Walking in France
Returning, after some time, to a place where you have been before can be an interesting experience Last week, we were back in Paris for two days after a two-year absence and, before that, a two-decade-long stint. We were surprised how much had changed in such a relatively short while around our former neighbourhood: the…
A multi-site exhibition in Nice celebrates the past and the present of France’s second most famous and most attractive boulevard The past is a foreign country, the novel “The Go Between” famously begins, and although we all know that “they do things differently there”, we are often insufficiently aware of the size of the gap…
Biot is that rare thing of a Riviera hilltop town: as unassuming, authentic and unspoilt as you can expect any town in this part of the world to be The stretch between Antibes and Nice Airport is, without a doubt, the ugliest section of the Cote d’Azur: on the one side of the road and…
One more reason to hike up to this picturesque hilltop town: a street sculpture exhibition. Street sculpture shows are very much in fashion. Over the last 20 years or so, many towns have hit upon the idea of hosting a festival by inviting artists or museums to exhibit some of their works on public squares…
Picasso spent the last 12 years of his life here, but there are many other reasons to visit this hilltop village north of Cannes. If the French Riviera is not exclusively famous for being a playground of people with more money than sense – from 19th century Russian aristocrats via eccentric East Coast heiresses during…
The Saint Hospice promontory – hermits, shepherds and gazillionaires – is always worth a return visit. It was just a question of time before such a thing would happen, and then, last week, it finally did. She said so: It was St Jean Cap Ferrat all over again “We have been here before.” Mrs. Easy…
Elsewhere in the world, the word may be that “the Russians are coming”; in the coastal region between Nice and Sanremo, they have arrived long ago and been part of the local communities for well over 150 years Once upon a time, before the advent of satellite TV dishes and the world-wide web, immigrants, even…
200 years after the event, we followed the Emperor and his army on the first stage of their walk back to Paris and to Waterloo On 1 March 1815, the recently deposed Emperor Napoleon landed with a small band of 1000 loyal soldiers in Golfe Juan near Cannes, arriving from his exile in Elba to…
On the basis of the evidence, it feels safe to say that the Empire’s troops did not come here to enjoy the beautiful beaches The history of the Riviera, if we are honest, begins in the 17th century when its oldest towns were built, and it really picks up 200 years later with the invention…
The capital of the French Riviera was the great love in the life of one of the 20th century’s greatest artists The list of famous painters who have been claimed as the genius loci of one Riviera town or the other is long: Cagnes-sur-Mer has Renoir, St Paul de Vence has Chagall, Menton has Jean…