Learning to love the Cote d'Azur (Menton)

Member Name: duncantorr

Product:	Menton
Date:	29/10/03 (940 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Character and style, Lovely hinterland, Historic interest

Disadvantages: Expensive, Part of snobbish area, Can be crowded

You either love or loathe the Côte d'Azur. There is no middle way. Like all places that are extremes of their kind, it excites extreme responses, both for and against.

Five minutes on La Croisette - the promenade - at Cannes is enough to confirm me in my life membership of the loathers. The place is so insufferably pleased with itself. The swanky hotels, each with its private parasoled stretch of beach across the palmy boulevard, down which red Ferraris and air-conditioned black or silver Mercedes cruise, their numbers swelled by stretch limos during the Film Festival. The posh apartment blocks that blister the leafy hill behind the town - "Californie" as it is locally known. The ostentatious white yachts in the harbour with their ostentatious bronzed owners noisily treating cronies to champagne. The fur-coated widows escorting their fur-coated poodles for a promenade and a coiffure.

To me, Cannes reeks of having been fashionable for far too long; indeed, of having reached a point where it can regard itself as above fashion and able to look down on it. It reeks of being not just over-priced but proud of it. It reeks of arrogance, bare-faced chic. It reminds you that "snob" in pre-war franglais was used as a term of admiration, even praise. It's almost as obnoxious as Monte Carlo.

Funny I should mention Monte Carlo. For if you travel east along the crowded coast from Cannes, past the fortified film stars' villas on the Cap d'Antibes, past the fever and the fret of Nice, past the bijou former fishing villages of Villefranche, Beaulieu and Èze, past the tiny tax-haven principality of Monaco, you will find wedged between Monte Carlo and the Italian border an area known as the pays mentonnais. Its main town, Menton, is either completely different from the rest of the Côte d'Azur or much the same, depending on which way you choose to look at it.

Personally, I prefer to look at it from the perspec
tive that makes it appear completely different. And just as five minutes on La Croisette at Cannes makes me loathe the Côte d'Azur, five minutes in the old town at Menton convinces me that I lôve it really after all.

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Why? What's so different? There are big hotels in Menton too, some with pretensions to swankiness, and apartment blocks, and yachts in the harbour, and pricey restaurants. There are widows with rinses d'azur, gold jewellery and poodles in such abundance that one has to wonder what they've all done to attain widowhood en masse. There are even specimens of la jeunesse dorée, although they look slightly lost, as if on their way to Monte Carlo they somehow pointed their Porsches at the wrong slip road off the autoroute.

Subtly, though, the entire ambience is different, and induces a different mood. Menton is not glitzy, nor even assertive. It is calm, relaxed, at ease with itself. Rather than being arrogantly above fashion, the town simply seems so self-possessed as to be impervious to it. You sense it has a long and comfortable history as a place of peaceful pleasure, and is content to remain just that, adapting to the ebb and flow of the times as necessary but never really altering.

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Much of Menton's character derives from the fact that it is not purely French. In the middle ages, as Mentone, it owed allegiance alternately to the House of Savoy and the republic of Genoa. In 1346 the town was bought by Grimaldi, Prince of Monaco. Together with Monaco it was sometimes under the protection of France and sometimes under that of the Kingdom of Sardinia, until it was finally and formally ceded to France in 1861.

The old town, on a hill overlooking the harbour, exudes the influence of Italian side of its ancestry. Hill-top towns in Tuscany and Umbria

are much like this. I say "on a hill", but as one explores the warren of narrow lanes and stairways that almost tunnel through the ancient buildings ("vennels" as they would be called in Durham) it feels more as if the hill itself has grown up from centuries of layer piling upon layer of human construction. In the shadowy alleys the stone slab pavements are cool and the narrow-fronted houses look dark and forbidding, but one is conscious that some of them blossom out into balconies and gardens when they reach the light amid the tiled roof-tops above.

Dominating the whole higgledy-piggledy pile is the magnificent Italianate church of St Michel Parvis, fronting a small square mosaic-paved in a facsimile of the Grimaldi coat of arms. This is reached by a steep stairway, from which the view stretches back over the harbour and away around the sweep of the coast beyond the Italian border, a mere kilometre or two away.

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Squeezed between the old town and the promenade is a pedestrianised shopping, café and restaurant area of only slightly more recent vintage. Here is a busy covered market, filled with mouth-watering displays of produce as only a French market can be, and a couple of pleasant squares where you can sip an aperitif or a beer and watch the locals and your fellow-visitors. Somehow, visitor seems the right word for Menton. Tourists or even holiday-makers would doubtless be made welcome yet be subtly out of place, whilst visitors felt naturally at home and comfortable.

West from here stretches the "modern" town centre. Modern in Menton parlance means dating from the formal incorporation into France in 1861, and the heart of the town is late nineteenth century, much of it in the elegant style of the Belle Epoque, some of it early twentieth with Art Deco influences.

Here we find the Town Hall, incorporating a suite decorat

ed by Jean Cocteau for wedding ceremonies (there is also a Cocteau Museum housed in a bastion in the harbour wall), the Casino and the Biovès Gardens, venue each year for the Lemon Festival.

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Shielded on its Northern side by a ring of mountains, Menton has claims to be the warmest resort on the Riviera, and this has historically made it a centre for citrus-growing, as well as for olives and flowers.

Every February it celebrates this local industry with an exuberant Lemon Festival, which is either grotesquely tacky or charming in its timeless insouciance, depending on one?s point of view. Each of the citrus-growing districts or villages of the pays mentonnais assembles a tableau in citrus fruit to a set theme. The themes tend to be whimsical in the extreme. This year the theme was "Alice au Pays de Merveilles" (Alice in Wonderland); when I was there two years ago it was fairy-tales.

On the opening day of the Festival these contributions - ten-foot high Mad Hatters or two-metre long grinning Cheshire cats, all fashioned from oranges and lemons - are paraded on floats along the promenade and through the town to their final resting place on public display in the Biovès Gardens. Meanwhile, bands of musicians in various gaudy outfits, who have been part of the original parade, tend to go on performing all round the town.

It is not an full-blown Carnival in the manner of Rio or Cadiz, being far too restrained and sedate to qualify. To describe it makes it sound absurd and perhaps it is, but if you enter into the spirit of the thing, it is also great fun.

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The mountains that surround Menton, dotted as they are on their lower slopes with citrus, olive and mimosa-growing villages, make great walking country. An short ride by bus or car will take you up to the "
;perc
hed" villages of Gorbio, Ste Agnès or Castellar, with rocky wooded pathways in between. And if you can find your way 15km or so inland to the little mediaeval town of Sospel, the day-long trek back to Menton round the slopes of Mont Razet along the GR 52 footpath, with views back to the Alps slowly giving way to a panorama out over the Mediterranean, is one of the most exhilarating I have ever experienced.

Alternatively, it is only a few kilometres walk or drive over the border into Italy to the Hanbury Gardens, which spill down a series of terraces, luxuriant with sub-tropical planting, to the sea-shore in a setting of extraordinary natural loveliness.

Even to a non-gardener they're worth the trip, but for enthusiasts Menton is also amply provided with gardens of its own. "Ma ville est un jardin" is the city's current slogan. The botanical gardens at Val Rahmeh and the garden museum "Serre de la Madonne" are particularly well-known, but the unofficial www.menton.com website lists no fewer than twelve gardens open to the public in the vicinity.

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Needless to say for a town that has been a Riviera resort for centuries, Menton is copiously provided with places to stay. The official website www.villedementon.com lists no fewer than thirty-nine hotels of all star ratings from 4 down to 0, plus youth hostel, three campsites and agencies for renting rooms and apartments.

I have a particular preference, and it is a self-indulgent one: the 3-star family owned Hotel L'Aiglon. Housed in an elegant though somewhat faded belle époque mansion - all mirrors and chandeliers - in a quiet position about half a kilometre west of the old town and a block back from the beach, it is a pleasant place to stay. I say "self-indulgent" but it really isn?t expensive by British standards. My wife and I paid Euro92 (about £65) p
er night f
or a well-equipped double room with balcony overlooking the garden and swimming-pool, which is kept heated all year round. At French hotels you pay by the room, not by the person, and they are almost always better value than British. I suspect you could find somewhere decent to stay much more cheaply in Menton if you wanted to shop around.

Again, among the numerous restaurants (about sixty listed on the website), I have a favourite: A Braijade Meridounale, secreted away deep in the old town. They offer a variety of all-inclusive set menus with local specialities, complete with nibbles and trimmings, their own lemon-based aperitif, plus wine and digestif to round off the meal. When I was there in February my wife and I went mad and ran up a bill for nearly Euros70 between us (about £22.50 a head), service compris, for not-quite-the-most-expensive four-course menu plus the usual extra glass or two of wine for me! Mind you, I don't know where else you can find this kind of value elsewhere in Menton, let alone in the UK. Characteristically the restaurants, typically for the Côte d'Azur, are expensive by French standards, although they seem very good value relative to their equivalents - if you can find their equivalents - on this side of the channel.

And, before we leave the subject of gastronomy, there is lemon tart. Menton makes the best in France, which is to say the best in the universe.

Night life. Eating apart, for the young, there are also one or two clubs and discos, although it is only fair to admit that Menton is not really a young party person's town.

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Getting there? Couldn't be simpler. You can fly into Nice/Côte d?Azur by BA, British Midland or Easyjet from a number of UK airports, and either hire a car or take the short train-ride along the coast.

If you don't mind driving 800+ miles from Calais, th
at's the wa
y to see most en route, provided you do the sensible thing and take three days or more each way, stopping and enjoying France rather than blatting blinkered down the autoroute. But in
my view the pleasantest way (and possibly the cheapest if you can take advantage of an offer or a deal) is by train. In these days of Eurostar and TGV the distance is comfortably accomplished from London within a day, still leaving time for a leisurely dinner at one of the excellent restaurants.

However you do it, of course it?s not going to be the cheapest holiday on offer. When all is said and done we are still talking about the French Riviera, love it or loathe it, where style and charm have always had a price-tag attached. But at least in Menton the price-tag is attached discreetly, and you might feel that what you experience is worth it. I do.

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Perhaps learning to love the Côte d'Azur is simply one of the classic signs of growing old, and in doing so I am succumbing to senility. A year or two ago I would have ascribed my change of heart and incipient love-affair with the place to my astuteness in having discovered in Menton an under-recognised and semi-secret gem, a genuine diamond on this coast of glittering glass, but I find to my alarm that I am not alone in my enthusiasm. A recent article in the Sunday Times describes it thus: "Once you've stopped in Menton, you'll not want to leave. It's the pick of the Riviera, a great site between mountains and sea, and a secretive old town stacked up the hill..." and so on. Well, now they've blown the gaff any incentive I might have had to keep quiet about it has been removed. Better hurry before all the Sunday Times readers get there, while it's still enjoyable.


© duncantorr 2003 (torr on Ciao UK)

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