The Riviera Guide

The guide · by Metro Mode

Nice

The Riviera's capital, between the Baie des Anges and the first Alps

Nice sits on the curve of the Baie des Anges, its back to an amphitheatre of hills and the Mercantour behind them, the Var valley closing it to the west and Mont Boron to the east. Greeks from Massalia founded a settlement here and called it Nikaia after Nike, the goddess of victory; the Romans built their own town, Cemenelum, on the hill of Cimiez, where its baths and amphitheatre still stand.

For most of its history the city looked to Italy rather than to Paris. In 1388 it placed itself under the protection of the Counts of Savoy and became the capital of the County of Nice; apart from the years of the French Republic and Empire, it stayed Savoyard and then Piedmontese-Sardinian until the Treaty of Turin of 1860 ceded it to France. That long Italian chapter is legible everywhere – in the red-ochre façades of Place Masséna, modelled on a square in Turin, and in the street names of the old town.

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From the second half of the eighteenth century English families began wintering here, and Nice invented the Riviera season: in the 1820s the English colony paid for the first coastal walk, the future Promenade des Anglais. Russian aristocrats followed, then the painters – Matisse, Chagall, later Arman and Niki de Saint Phalle. On 27 July 2021 UNESCO inscribed «Nice, the winter resort town of the Riviera» on the World Heritage List.

Today the city reads in layers: Vieux Nice and its market on the Cours Saleya, Le Port below the Castle Hill, the Belle Époque grid of the Musiciens and the Carré d'Or, Cimiez with its palaces and museums, Mont Boron's pines above the sea, and to the north-west the terraced vineyards of Bellet, the only appellation wine grown entirely within a large French city.

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