Whenever we travel, there lurks, beneath the obvious excitements of food, scenery and questionable souvenirs, a quieter itch: to work out what a place is really about. Not the glossy brochure version, not the postcard clichés, but its essence. What it whispers to itself when no one’s listening. We want to feel it in our bones, if only for a moment. At the very least, we want to stumble across something genuinely delightful—ideally with a good bottle of wine to hand.
I’ve lived on the Riviera for twelve years now and still find myself circling that question: what is this place actually about? The answer, maddeningly, seems to be: almost everything. The Riviera is a constant saturation of life, a postcard that never stops changing. The light slips, the colours tilt, the air itself seems to re-edit the view. It’s like living inside a kaleidoscope. Only in this kaleidoscope you can swim, nap, eat well, and drink rosé until your brain resembles a Provençal grape. All while the scenery politely revolves around you at a pleasantly tipsy speed.
What the Riviera doesn’t have, though, are the proper, heavyweight museums. Yes, there are a few, but they’re the kind you visit twice—three times if you’re unusually polite or happen to have particularly demanding in-laws. The first visit is curiosity. The second is obligation. After that, you run out of excuses. The sort of museum you haunt because a single painting has you transfixed—no, not here. And rightly so. Indoors at all feels faintly absurd. Indoors without at least one glass wall feels like a form of punishment.
That, really, is what the Riviera is about—whether French or Italian (and let’s be honest, you can barely tell where one ends and the other begins). It is about living outside. Blindingly, dazzlingly outside. So dazzling, in fact, that it’s a wonder the whole thing doesn’t topple into pure kitsch. Well, occasionally it does: a vulgar new villa, a badly placed hotel, the sort of design decision that makes you mutter “who approved that?” But somehow, here, even kitsch is softened. It sticks out like an accidental exclamation mark rather than a catastrophe.
It’s ironic, really. With all our modern technology, materials, and architectural genius, we still can’t manage to build anything that looks as though it belongs. Whereas people in the past—armed with nothing more advanced than a hammer, a donkey, and some suspiciously bendy stones—managed it effortlessly. Somewhere along the way, we mislaid that sense of harmony.
Yet for every modern blot, there is a village so perfectly composed you’d swear it was staged, a view so balanced you half-expect to see a museum label underneath it. And speaking of museums, there is one I return to—though calling it a museum is stretching things. Château de la Napoule is something else: dense with meaning, full of quiet, cryptic symbolism. Proof that art can say an extraordinary amount while pretending not to say anything at all. To me it reads like a hymn to love—profound, intelligent, enduringly beautiful. But that, frankly, is better explained while standing in its courtyard, glass in hand, with the Mediterranean muttering at the edge of the garden.
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