336 hours in Vence and Nice

The role of gentleman traveler requires one to wake an hour before sunrise ― while the quotidian tourist is still asleep ― and set out on foot to Vieux Nice. You are the street sweeper, the brasserie table setter, the backpacked student se précipiter à l'école,  moving about town alone, unencumbered by maps and injunctions and standard procedures. Chez moi is three blocks from the beach. A street sweeper on Rue de la Buffa. The checkerboard pavement of Place Massena. No fig leaf for this Apollo. Tour de L'Horloge (1725). Not a church, but an alarm system. There's a fire, we're under attack, et cetera. Looking for justice? This way. A toilet? Right this way. Je vous en pris. Ruelle Halle aux Herbes. Place Halle aux Herbes. Swaying laundry off Place Rossetti. Street signs in this part of town are in both French and Italian. Wonderful names, evocative names. This part of Nice is a poem written in marble and stone. Below is Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate, in Place Rossetti, w...

A rainbow leads to Place Massena after a sunrise shower. The elevated Buddha-like figures ― there are seven ― are by the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. This stretch of tramway was constructed in 2007. After a five-year closure, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris will reopen in three weeks. The news got me to thinking about Paris' half-Italian cousin on the Mediterranean, which looks a lot like the capital but with one profound difference: Nice has zero Gothic architecture. No skyward-straining spires or steeples. The city has been besieged and burned to the ground too many times. Not only that, whatever archives that existed documenting life in the Middle Ages here were destroyed when a powder magazine on the chateau hill exploded during Louis XIV's first siege in 1691.  Poof. Institutional amnesia. Visual amnesia. The Gallo-Roman stuff you can't destroy, of course. In the northern suburb of Cimiez is this modest amphitheater, about 65 meters in diameter.  After gladiator games w...

A raging fire caused by a gas leak destroyed the theater in 1881, killing 65 people. The architect hired to rebuild it designed a stone and brick facade with a hidden metal-girder skeleton. The result is an attractive Italian-style horseshoe the size of a matchbox. In North America, Puccini's "Edgar" has been assigned to oblivion, performed every generation or so (shout-out to Kansas City 2005!). The libretto is probably silly ―my Italian isn't good enough to say ― but the versions on Spotify used to familiarize myself with "Edgar" had some whirling, voluptuous melodies. The music is undeniably great. What I couldn't have anticipated was the production's snarl, its violence. Near the beginning of the third act during the Addio, mio dolce amore, when Edgar's shrouded body is laid out, and Fidelia (Ekaterina Bakanova) sings "My heart died with you today" ― Europe, man. You can't beat it.  At 4:09, Bakanova genuinely chokes up from t...

Cleaning ladies in the St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in Nice. The key to the apartment was in a lockbox attached to a pole in an alley two blocks away. I appear to have the sixth floor to myself. There are no other doormats, no family names, no one comes or leaves. The communal washbasins in the hallways and single detached bathroom tell me the maison's "help" were lodged here in the early 20th century, Downton Abbey-style. I stayed in a building of similar vintage in Vienna with the same setup. No one wants to live in a 9-square-meter room without a bathroom anymore, but smart Airbnb investors have long seen the potential of pint-sized apartments and they could well serve a role in alleviating homelessness as housing costs continue to climb out of reach.  For many, the future is already here. As I pointed out in my  Hong Kong blog, the average living space on the island is 160 square feet per person, with many having it much worse.   Next Previous

Hard to believe I've been in Vence for 10 days. It was more picturesque and charming than I could have imagined.  Walking through the high schoolers' vape clouds outside Lycee Henri Matisse each morning on my way to the bus stop, I couldn't be optimistic about how many of these kids will be here two or three years from now. But Vence is a rich, resilient, desirable place to live. It'll be OK. Just before leaving town for good, I crossed the gorge to visit Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary, a commission that he worked on from 1948 to 1951. He was a brooding, unwell man at this time, making little paper cutouts of jellyfish shapes, his painting days long behind. After undergoing major surgery and fearing German bombings in Nice, he moved to Vence in 1943, where he was cared for by nurse Monique Bourgeois, who went on to pose for several portraits. A year later she joined a convent. In 1945 she received a long letter from the artist saying that he had come to terms with t...

"The Earth is made of God's love and the same green cheese as the moon." Because each of us has the equivalent of a Google Translate app in our head, this is what I heard when a bus driver told me no buses go to Gourdon and that I would need a car to visit the mountaintop village. The thing is, Gourdon predates Roman times and the automobile is only a hundred years old. A puzzle piece is missing. We made a deal that he would take me to the Pont du Loup stop on the D2210 road between Vence and Grasse and I'll take it from there. The result was an unforgettable day on Le Chemin du Paradis . What a bus stop it is. Appropriately enough, the Path to Paradise is a difficult one. Even with Fahrenheit temps in the high 50s you will soak through at least one shirt and find yourself, hands on hips, taking a breather every couple hundred meters. At least three pillars that held up the old Chemins de fer de Provence railway are still standing here. Honestly, it's not too lat...