If you have been in Nizza at any time during the past three years, you will have noticed that large sections of the city appear to be under construction.
The various building sites across the town centre are all part of the Nice Tramway Line 2 project, the east-to-west line designed to complement the T1 north-south route.
Since 1 July, when the western section of the new line was officially opened, the T2 is now bringing parts of the city nearer to you that have so far been hard to reach, including some areas of outstanding natural beauty.
Well, in theory, at least.
In practice, meanwhile, the story is a little different. The western outskirts of Nice may have become nearer but – for the time being – are still some way off the central train station. Because first, you will need to find a station that is already open.
All city centre stops of Nice tramway line 2 – between the downtown shopping district and the port – remain under construction and are scheduled for completion in June 2019.
So the first walk of the day took us about a mile to the west of the Place Massena. This walk turned out to be more pleasant than expected.
We found our Nice tramway line 2 stop
Turning right into Boulevard Victor Hugo and/or Rue du Marechal Joffre from Avenue Jean Medecin, you acquaint yourself with parts of Nice that you don’t get to see on the visitors’ routine itinerary between the Boulevard des Anglais, the Old Town and the shopping district.
The walk through this part of town, called the Thiers quarter, with its grand buildings both old …
… and a little less old …
… leads you into the Gambetta neighbourhood and the Rue de France which is busy rather than charming – and, in all due respect, interesting rather than beautiful – although this area, too, has its architectural moments.
At the end of Rue de France, just before the large intersection, you will find the Magnan tramway stop.
Around the corner, on rue Isadora Duncan (the famous dancer was killed in a freak automobile accident a short distance away from here on the Boulevard des Anglais), you will also encounter the first of the dozen or so art works that were newly commissioned to line and accentuate the T2 line.
See the internationally renowned Jean-Pierre Raynauds’s Metamorphoses. (Oversized flower pots very much like this pair have been on show in Beijing’s Forbidden City, on Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz and in the Centre Pompidou at Paris.)
Four stations have so far been adorned with new art works.
At Carras, there is a pair of Greek deities (conceived by Sasha Sosno), Poseidon …
… and Venus, …
… while Philippe Ramette’s Eloge du Deplacement meanders along the Boulevard Paul Montel near the station of the same name.
The ice cream cone (Fruitée) by Joana Vasconcelos, meanwhile (see the photo at the top of the post), is well worth a closer look: it is not just decorative but also more clever than you may think at a superficial glance.
Our idea was to take the tramway to its new terminus at CADAM and to walk from there to the River Var where a riverbank footpath leads through something like a nature reserve.
The neighbourhood of the CADAM is a grim part of town of Nice: certainly not beautiful and frankly not that interesting either, all six-lane freeways and scattered tower blocks.
Alongside the Boulevard de Mercantour, there is a public garden, grandly called the Parc de la Prefecture but in fact a scruffy bit of grass and trees where – when we arrived on a Saturday morning – people from the neighbouring council estate were busy preparing a picnic.
This public garden leads into the only street for miles that allows you to cross the motorway, but the turnstile was closed, possibly because the underpass appeared to be undergoing some minor repairs.
This, presumably, will change at some stage, but it did not change quickly enough for us. We were disappointed, but there you go. You can’t win them all and must be able to accept defeat rather than try to force your head through a wall. Or a turnstile, in this case.
So we turned around and went back to Magnan by tram, following which we repeated our short walk through the western part of the inner city, just to get some walking done for the day.
This also gave us an opportunity for a roadside lunch as well as a nice view of the pleasantly eccentric Chateau des Baumettes (from the corner of Rue Bottero and Rue Gambetta) which we had missed the first time around because we had taken a slightly different route.
And here is the good news: there is unlimited free use of the new Nice tramway line 2 until the end of August. This will allow you to explore the new tramway line 2 route, getting on and off the trains as often as you want (to have a closer look at some of the works of art or to explore the various neighbourhoods).
For more information on the new Nice tramway line 2 and its works of art, go to the dedicated brochures published by the local tourism office.
