Côte d'Azur

Côte d'Azur Travel Guide

With the Alps playing bodyguard against inland winds and the sultry Mediterranean warming the breezes, the Côte d'Azur, or French Riviera, is pampered by a nearly tropical climate. This is where the dreamland of azure waters and indigo sky begins, where balustraded white villas edge the blue horizon, evening air is perfumed with jasmine and mimosa, and parasol pines silhouette against sunsets of ripe apricot and gold. As emblematic as the sheet-music cover for a Jazz Age tune, the Côte d'Azur seems to epitomize happiness, a state of being the world pursues with a vengeance.

But the Jazz Age dream confronts modern reality: on the hills that undulate along the blue water, every cliff, cranny, gully, and plain bristles with cubes of hot-pink cement and iron balconies, each skewed to catch a glimpse of the sea and the sun. Like a rosy rash, these crawl and spread, outnumbering the trees and blocking each other's views. Their owners and renters, who arrive on every vacation and at every holiday -- Easter, Christmas, Carnival, All Saints' Day -- choke the tiered highways with bumper-to-bumper cars, and on a hot day in high summer the traffic to the beach -- slow-flowing at any time -- coagulates and blisters in the sun.

There has always been a rush to the Côte d'Azur (or Azure Coast), starting with the ancient Greeks, who were drawn eastward from Marseille to market their goods to the natives. From the 18th-century English aristocrats who claimed it as one vast spa to the 19th-century Russian nobles who transformed Nice into a tropical St. Petersburg to the 20th-century American tycoons who cast themselves as romantic sheiks, the beckoning coast became a blank slate for their whims. Like the modern vacationers who followed, they all left their mark -- villas, shrines -- temples all to the sensual pleasures of the sun and sultry sea breezes. Artists, too, made the Côte d'Azur their own, as museum goers who have studied the sunny legacy of Picasso, Renoir, Matisse, and Chagall will attest. Today's admirers can take this all in, along with the Riviera's textbook points of interest: animated St-Tropez; the Belle Epoque aura of Cannes; the towns made famous by Picasso -- Antibes, Vallauris, Mougins; the urban charms of Nice; and several spots where the per-capita population of billionaires must be among the highest on the planet: Cap d'Antibes, Villefranche-sur-Mer, and Monaco.

Veterans know that the beauty of the Côte d'Azur coastline is only skin deep, a thin veneer of coddled glamour that hugs the water and hides a much more ascetic region up in the hills. These low-lying mountains and deep gorges are known as the arrière-pays (backcountry) for good cause: they are as aloof and isolated as the waterfront resorts are in the swim. Medieval stone villages cap rocky hills and play out scenes of Provençal life -- the game of boules, the slowly savored pastis (the anise-and-licorice-flavored spirit mixed slowly with water), the farmers' market -- as if the ocean were a hundred miles away. Some of them have become virtual Provençal theme parks, catering to busloads of tourists day-tripping from the coast. But just behind them, dozens of hill towns stand virtually untouched, and you can lose yourself in a cobblestone maze.

You could drive from St-Tropez to the border of Italy in three hours and take in the entire Riviera, so small is this renowned stretch of Mediterranean coast. Along the way you'll undoubtedly encounter the downside: jammed beaches, insolent waiters serving frozen seafood, traffic gridlock. But once you dabble your feet off the docks in a picturesque port full of brightly painted boats, or drink a Lillet in a hilltop village high above the coast, or tip your face up to the sun from a boardwalk park bench and doze off to the rhythm of the waves, you will very likely be seduced to linger.