Nice: Promenade des Anglais and the old town

The Promenade des Anglais, over seven kilometers of seafront desired by the mid-19th-century English resident community in the city, remains today the city's main stage for outdoor life.

The Vieux Nice, the old town with pastel colors and narrow streets of Genoese character, hosts every morning in Cours Saleya a market of flowers and local products active since the late 1800s.

The Castle Hill, where a medieval fortress once stood before being demolished in the 1700s, today holds only ruins and a public park, yet remains the highest panoramic point over the entire Bay of Angels.

The Matisse Museum, housed in a seventeenth-century Genoese villa on the Cimiez hill, displays works donated directly by the artist, who chose to live and die in Nice from 1917 onward.

The Promenade des Anglais carries in its name the memory of those who had it built, yet today it belongs more to those who jog there in the morning than to any foreign aristocracy.

From Castle Hill, that same waterfront becomes a thin line against the blue of the bay — the perspective that perhaps best explains why Matisse chose to stay.