The French Riviera: Nice, Monaco, and Villefranche
The ship anchored in the bay at Villefranche-sur-Mer rather than docking at a pier, which meant tender boats to shore. This initially sounded like extra steps. Turned out it meant approaching from the water, watching the harbor come into focus slowly as the tender crossed the bay, the pastel waterfront buildings getting bigger, the hills getting greener, the Riviera announcing itself in the most effective way possible: just being itself from a distance.
Monaco
Monaco is a sovereign country that occupies about two square kilometers of French coastline. It has a population of around 40,000 people and is the second smallest country in the world. Roughly 30 percent of residents are millionaires. The entire national economy runs on finance, tourism, and the casino at Monte Carlo. There are no income taxes. I mention all this because the place makes more sense when you hold those facts in your head while walking through it.
The harbor — Port Hercule — is a parking lot for superyachts. Not figuratively. Row after row of them, enormous and white, idling in the sun with crew members wiping them down. The streets above the harbor are spotless in the way that only cities with unlimited maintenance budgets can sustain. Everything gleams. It’s a real place and also a theater set that’s been running for centuries without breaking character.
Up the hill from the harbor, on a rocky promontory overlooking the Mediterranean, the Prince’s Palace has been the Grimaldi family residence since 1297. Over 700 years in the same building. The changing of the guard happens at 11:55 AM daily, which is a very Monaco-specific level of precision. I watched it. The guards were extremely serious about it. The tourists were extremely cheerful about the guards being extremely serious. A good time was had by most.
Nice
Nice was a relief after Monaco. A real city. Real streets with real businesses and people using them for actual purposes. The Promenade des Anglais runs along the seafront — the famous blue chairs lined up facing the water, the pebble beach, the Riviera light doing its best work on everything in range. The buildings along the old town are the right kind of faded: ochre and rose and pale yellow, wrought-iron balconies trailing plants, shutters open to catch the afternoon breeze.
The Cours Saleya market was where I lost track of time. Flowers and produce and lavender sachets and olives in every color and stalls of local honey and stallholders who have been doing this long enough to be unimpressed by people pointing cameras at their goods. I bought lavender soap and a small jar of fig jam. Felt disproportionately satisfied about it. There’s something about a market like this — the particular pleasure of buying something small and specific from a person who grew it or made it.
Villefranche at Dusk
Back in Villefranche for the last tender to the ship, the light had shifted completely. The Riviera in the morning is bright and sharp. At dusk it goes gold and soft and forgiving in a way that explains every Impressionist who came south to paint it. The harbor, the waterfront buildings, the hills above — everything was doing something different than it had been at 8 AM. The tender ride back felt like leaving something you’d only just arrived at.
Three places in a single port day. Monaco is a spectacle — worth seeing, not worth wanting to live in. Nice is a real city that earns its reputation without trying particularly hard. Villefranche is the quiet one, the harbor you arrived through and left through, the one that bookended everything with the best possible light. They shouldn’t work together as a day trip. They do.
