For long it played a preëminent rôle in the history of these parts. To-day one makes his way by one of the ever-pushing electric trams which, in France, are threading every suburban byway in the vicinities of the cities and large towns. In other days this was the ancient Roman way which bound Cimiez and Vence, the Via Augusta, the most ancient communication between Italy and Gaul. Evidences of its old foundations are not deeply hidden, and this stretch of roadway must ever remain one of the most vivid examples of the utilitarian industry of the colonizing Romans in Gaul. At Cimiez there are many evidences of the old Roman builders and their unequalled art, fragments of temples, aqueducts, baths, and amphitheatres. Everything is very fragmentary, often but a bit of a column, a sculptured leg or arm, or a morsel of a plate; but there is everything to prove that Cimiez was a most important place in its time. The most notable of these ruins is the amphitheatre, built after the conventional manner of theatre-building invented by the Greeks before the Romans, and which has, in truth, not been greatly changed up to to-day, except that it has been roofed over. The theatre at Cimiez in no way suggests those other Provençal examples at Orange or Arles, the peers of their class in western Europe, and the stone-cutting was of a very rude quality or has greatly crumbled in the ages. Such of the walls and arches as are visible to-day show a hardiness and correctness of design which, however, is not lived up to in the evidences of actual workmanship. There are no grandiose structures anywhere in the vicinity; everything is fragmentary, but Cimiez was evidently an important city in embryo, which some untoward influence prevented ever coming to its full-blown glory. CHAPTER XI. VILLEFRANCHE AND THE FORTIFICATIONS Nice in many respects is the centre from which radiates all the life of the Riviera; moreover its military and strategic importance attains the same distinction; it is the base of the whole system, social and political. East and west the “Côte d’Azur” extends until it runs against the grime and commercial activity of Marseilles on the one side, and Genoa on the other. From the heights back of Nice one sees the Ligurian coast stretch away to infinity, with the sea and the distant isles to the right, while to the left are the peaks of the Maritime Alps. [Illustration: _Cap Ferrat_] On this _pied de terre_ France has organized a great series of defences by land and sea. On every height is a fort or a battery, like the castle-crowned crags of the Rhine. The bays and harbours below the foot-hills are all defended from the menaces of a real or imaginary foe by a guardian fringe of batteries and defences of all ranks, and, what with battle-ships and torpedo-boats, and destroyers and submarines, this frontier strip is in no more danger of sudden attack by an unfriendly power than are the interior provinces of Berry and Burgundy.