When I tell you that we visited a park last weekend to get away from midwinter blues, you will still have no idea of the type of thing that we saw and the type of experience that we had. Whether we had a pleasant but essentially low-octane stroll between flowerbeds, well-tendered lawns and playgrounds for…
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…
Holidays would be different if we had unlimited amounts of time for them, but we do not. So they are what they are, which largely means: always too short. As a rule of thumb, the more affluent people are, the more often they will go on a vacation, but – since the time available for…
Why would you want to go into a public park on the French Riviera when nature in its untamed variety – more coastal walks and mountain hikes than you could possibly pack into a long holiday – is only ever a bus ride away? On most days, admittedly, any argument in favour of a trip to…
Enough about painters and the French Riviera! Entire books have been written about the way in which the great modernists of European painting – from Monet to Picasso – fell in love with the lights and the sights and the colours of southern France. You don’t even have to go to the library to read…
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…
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…
Easy Hikes in the South of France For people who live in and around Nice, Mont Boron is the most readily accessible piece of “real nature” just in front of their doorstep. It is convenient to reach on foot and/or on public transport, yet sufficiently forest-like to pass for the real thing. For visitors, Mont…
Urban walks in the South of France A French Riviera Walk in Nice For You Tracing the footsteps of an adventurous friar, the ancient Romans and Queen Victoria Today’s post is some sort of a post-scriptum to our brief series of seasonal promenades along the Cote d’Azur: a walk that we discovered only recently, in…
