Insider guides, curated itineraries and local knowledge from the French Riviera experts.
The Monaco Grand Prix takes place every May on streets that the principality uses for ordinary traffic the other fifty-one weeks of the year. The circuit is barely three kilometres long. Average speeds are lower than almost anywhere else on the calendar. Yet it remains, by any measure, the most prestigious event in motorsport. The […]
Read moreThe French Riviera ends at Menton. Beyond it, the Italian border and a different coast with different rhythms. Menton has always sat slightly apart from the glamour circuit, which is precisely what makes it interesting. This is a town of lemons. The Menton lemon, grown in terraced gardens above the city, is considered one of […]
Read moreThere is a tunnel on the Moyenne Corniche, cut through the rock just before Eze. You enter it in shadow, radio murmuring, the cliff pressing close on either side. You leave it in a wash of blue so vast and so sudden that conversation simply stops. This is what the Corniche roads French Riviera travellers […]
Read moreFifteen kilometres above Nice, the medieval village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence occupies a narrow ridge with the calm certainty of something that has been there long enough to stop needing to prove itself. The walls are intact. The lanes are stone. The light in the afternoon falls across the facades in a way that explains, without further […]
Read moreMost people who arrive in Monaco walk straight to the Casino. It is an understandable instinct, the kind of gravity that a building acquires when it has been famous long enough. But a Monaco private tour beyond casino visits and harbour selfies reveals a principality that has been accumulating history, beauty, and a quiet inner […]
Read moreMost visitors to the French Riviera follow the same circuit: Nice, Monaco, Cannes. They miss Antibes entirely. That is a mistake worth correcting. Antibes sits between Nice and Cannes on a headland jutting into the Mediterranean. The old town is enclosed by seventeenth-century ramparts designed by Vauban, the master fortification engineer of Louis XIV. Walking […]
Read moreThe road rises sharply out of Cannes, past terraced gardens and low stone walls, and after twenty minutes the air changes. Something floral, green, almost medicinal, arrives through the open window before you see a single sign for the town. This is how Grasse announces itself. Not with architecture or spectacle, but with scent. It […]
Read moreThere is a moment, as the road curves steeply out of Beaulieu-sur-Mer and the limestone walls close in on either side, when you understand why cinematographers have always been drawn to this part of the coast. Then the village appears: grey and ancient against the sky, and below it, impossibly far below, the Mediterranean opens […]
Read moreThe light is what they don’t warn you about. Not the summer light, fierce and flattening, turning every bay the colour of a postcard you have seen before, but the October light, the pale gold of an April morning, the extraordinary clarity of a January afternoon when the coast belongs to almost nobody. The French […]
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One day in Nice, done properly: the Cours Saleya market at breakfast, the Old Town and Colline du Chateau, Matisse and Chagall, lunch on Nicoise cooking, the Promenade at sunset. The order matters.
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