French Riviera

A weekend on the French Riviera, to discover the only stretch of the French coast still missing from our list. Difficult to choose the right weekend; unfortunately we found heavy traffic everywhere, because of the vintage car race in Monte Carlo and the imminent Grand Prix, the rose festival in Grasse, the bank holiday for the French, the imminent opening of the Cannes Film Festival — there's something for every taste. The first stop is Eze Village, a medieval village perched on a sheer drop and crossed by the Corniche Moyenne. We stroll through the streets of Eze, full of restaurants and very expensive hotels; we ought to visit the exotic garden, but time is short. The next day, a visit to St. Paul, a sixteenth-century village in the Nice hinterland, where the Maeght foundation is located, a very important collection of contemporary art.

It's surrounded by ancient walls, in a region of orange groves, vineyards and olive groves. Very beautiful are the uphill alleys of the village, with small craft shops selling all sorts of knick-knacks; the sculptures of "curvy" women are, they say, typical. We then go down to Cannes, where we walk along the Croisette; the Film Festival is being set up, so it's all one big building site. There are already many people on the beach and we're sorry we can only stand and watch. The hotels, with their outrageous prices, are beautiful examples of architecture. Then a stop in Grasse, a climate resort and city of perfumes, where the Rose festival is under way, plants and roses everywhere; there's also a kind of route among the roses where you pass under hundreds of little glass bottles containing coloured water and roses.

We visit the Fragonard perfume factory, where they explain the process of extracting the essences from the flowers.