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- La Turbie with Italy beyond
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- Eze, Cap Ferrat and the Baie des Anges
Nice still attracts a lot of visitors but I have to wonder what sort of a time most of them are having. I think a lot of them arrive with a very vague notion that this is an important historic city filled with monuments. In fact the attractions of Nice are quite hard to define. There are the museums which show an important legacy of early twentieth century art but few monuments of importance. The beach is well known but is not particularly fine and can be extraordinarily crowded in high season. The one thing that everyone seems to know about Nice is that it was a centre of the early tourism industry with the English giving their name to the Promenade des Anglais.
The visitors want a flavour of this famous past to understand why this became the best known tourist coast in the world. The truth is that the present can be quite a disappointment. A superficial visit will show a hugely busy modern city with a major traffic problem which the locals try to get around by driving as fast and as daringly as possible, roads everywhere, elevated, underground, twisted and turning, to try to get rid of some of this problem; very busy people who have lives to lead and aren’t particularly fond of the huge quantities of visitors that arrive each year; an architectural heritage that is mainly based in 60s and 70s brutalism, buildings everywhere, few of them good and many of them astonishingly awful; bad restaurants at every street corner and indifferent hotels. There are, as I mentioned above, few monuments of interest.
If I list the drawbacks it is not because I want to dissuade people from going to Nice but rather to explain how extraordinary the area is that can cope with these disadvantages. But the visitor that travels to Nice and the surrounding area has to realise that it takes a lot of planning and understanding to enjoy the place fully.
One way to do this is to go out of season when tables can be found in the better restaurants and prices are many per cent below normal. Another way is to leave the city centre and explore the surrounding hills and just take a look at some of the scenery that attracted people here in the first place. Because there is some of it left.
If I urge people to walk or hike it is because I have a genuine belief that this is the right way to see a place. So if you can drive just the few short miles up to La Turbie and head up into the Parc de la Grande Corniche and go for a walk. I did this today and after twenty minutes through the snowy trails I arrived at a point from where I could see the most spectacular panorama. To the east lay La Turbie, crowned with its most extraordinary monument the Trophée des Alpes, a huge Roman monument on the via Julia. Beyond were the headlands of Menton and Bordighera in Italy. To the north the ring of the Alps was majestic, covered in snow and glinting pink in the late afternoon sun. Underneath Monaco and Monte Carlo were as clear as a map, the twin turrets of the casino standing out by the giant pleasure craft in the harbour. Further west is the perched village of Eze and beyond the great headland of Cap Ferrat, Nice itself, and Antibes and the resorts along the riviera. The situation of the city and the beauty of what else is here was so apparent. I walked along the edge of the corniche looking over the sea and the mountains alternately. Later I descended a magnificent path to the coast at Cap d’Ail and walked along a sea promenade to Monaco, to be met by the cars from the vintage Monte Carlo rally. This was a day that people in the nineteenth century would have recognised, and delighted in.
Dinner in the SUPERB, Restaurant Christian Plumail l’Univers, 54, bd Jean Jaures, Nice. 04 93 62 32 22. Book if you can.
