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Nice - Guide

The City

Sometimes affectionately known as ‘The Big Olive,’ Nice is the Riviera’s largest, most intriguing city: a melange of French, Italian and North African influences, bordered by the vine-clad, lavender-carpeted foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes on one side and the azure waters of the Mediterranean on the other. This mix of influences has created a bustling port city that is nominally French, but has a ‘Niçoise’ identity all its own, detectable in its unique traditions, cuisine and even language.

As its cosmopolitan atmosphere suggests, it has passed through the hands of various conquerors. It was founded by the Greeks in the 4th century BC. Then, in the 1st century BC, the Romans built a town called Cemenelum on the hills of Cimiez, just above the city. By the end of the 2nd century AD Cemenelum was the capital of the Roman Alpes Maritimae province. In the Middle Ages, it was ruled by of the Counts of Provence, then by the Italian Dukes of Savoy. After it was unified with France in 1860, Queen Victoria and British aristocrats arrived in search of mild winters. They established a colony and built many of the features that distinguish Nice today, with exuberant belle époque hotels springing up along the palm-lined waterfront, which is aptly named Promenade des Anglais. Slightly later, in the 1920s, the city was discovered by American artists, tycoons and celebrities. F Scott Fitzgerald memorialised it in his beautiful novel Tender Is The Night, while Isadora Duncan met a glamorous but grisly end in front of the Négresco hotel when her silk scarf got caught in the wheels of her open-top Bugatti sports car. Matisse, too, settled here, entranced by the light.

For much of the last century Nice was regarded more as a gateway to the rest of the Côte d'Azur than as a destination in itself: people tended to stop off only briefly on their way to chicer destinations like Cannes and Monte Carlo. Over the past few years, however, holiday makers have taken a renewed interest in it, attracted by the fact that it remains a friendly and informal place, less disfigured by tourism than other, busier parts of the Riviera.

Today, the Promenade des Anglais is probably the best place to begin a stroll around the centre of Nice. With its backdrop of ornate, palatial buildings, it curves around a graceful bay, aptly named the Baie des Anges (Bay of Angels) and features a pedestrian boardwalk built above the pebbly beach. In the summer the air is suffused with the sweet smell of sizzling crepes from makeshift stalls and the beach swarms with sunbathers.

Wander along the Promenade to the Place Masséna. Its arcaded buildings are painted Sardinian red, a vestige of Nice’s Italian past, with peeling, pistachio-coloured shutters. From here you can take the plunge into the narrow alleys and vibrant markets of the Vieille Ville (Old Town). This is the heart of the city, its vivid Mediterranean colours – deep reds, faded rose, melon, lemon yellow and ochre – found nowhere else in France. It’s a mediaeval casbah of restaurants, bars, tourist traps, food stalls, and pickpockets, with tiny cobbled lanes that smell of fish, cheese and the local delicacy, socca (chickpea flatbread).

After negotiating this intriguing maze for a while, you’ll appreciate the wider spaces of the Cours Saleya – a wide pedestrian market flanked by dozens of sidewalk cafes and restaurants just a block from the sea. Six mornings a week, the Cours Saleya comes alive with stalls of flowers, olives, honey, tomatoes, aubergines, citrus fruits. Mondays are antique market days, when the Cours is filled with acres of goods, from fine silver and china to kitsch, from religious icons to 1920s erotica. The market is also is lined with restaurants where at any time of the day people sip local wine and snack on a socca, or on a slice of pissaladière, an onion pie garnished with anchovies and olives.

Roaming further afield, other parts of the city are less raffish, but just as enticing. The Cimiez district – home to the lovely Russian Orthodox Church and a 14th century Franciscan monastery – is leafy and palatial. It offers beautiful views of the Baie des Anges, as does Colline du Château (Castle Hill), the rocky promontory which was the site of the Greek city's Acropolis and later a Savoy fort, destroyed by Louis XIV.

For all its innate beauty and charm, Nice has had its ups and downs in recent decades. But it has overcome postwar corruption and municipal mismanagement (most apparent in the incredibly ugly, dun coloured Acropolis convention centre) to experience a 21st century resurgence, superbly marrying beach life with urban bustle.


Eating & Drinking

In spite of its ritzy image, Nice offers surprisingly varied opportunities for inexpensive eating, since Niçoise cooking is the product of resourceful chefs who learned to deal with meager harvests and is dominated by the one food source that is plentiful: olives and olive oil. In the old town a pleasing jumble of open-air cafes and intimate restaurants serve local specialties like salade niçoise, ravioli, plates of grilled sardines, farcies (stuffed vegetables) or fried zucchini blossoms. For those who would like something appetising to munch while on the move, a good option can pissaladiere: a Niçoise pizza of caramelized onions, anchovies and olives.

An authentic version of Nice’s signature dish, salad Niçoise, can be harder to find. Many local gourmets will advise you that the real thing no longer exists. It should be made from a base of raw baby artichoke hearts or raw broad beans, along with green peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, basil, hard-boiled eggs, local black olives and olive oil. Contrary to what most Anglophile guidebooks or cookbooks tell you, it never includes string beans, potatoes, lettuce or Chicken of the Sea. The real reason for its disappearance is said to be the fact that peeling and slicing raw artichokes was too time consuming for many restaurant kitchens.

Another famous – or perhaps infamous – Nice speciality for those with especially hardy palates is stockfish, a local preparation of dried cod that takes one full week of preparation followed by hours of cooking time. It arrives at your table as an innocuous-looking saucer filled with chunks of fish and olives aswim in a red, tomato-based stew. But it smells incredibly strong. People are reputed to hold their noses when eating it, but the delicious taste makes it well worth while.