Close to Napoule rises the conical hill of St Peyré, on the top of which are the scanty ruins of a castle and a chapel with an apse. At the base of the hill, and close to the public road, may be seen the remains of another apsidal chapel. Beyond this various branches of the Siagne are crossed, when a small conical hill crowned with [Illustration: FIG. 147. MONT ST CASSIEN.] wood rises abruptly on the left, to which the distant towers of Grasse and Mougin, with the mountains beyond, form a background. This hill is the Mont St Cassien, where a famous hermitage existed, and where a great popular festival is still held annually on the 23rd of July. An entrenched post was formed here under the Romans, for the defence of the Aurelian Way. On this spot was also erected a Temple of Venus surrounded with a sacred grove called the Ara Luci (hence the modern Arluc, a small town in the vicinity). In the seventh century this heathen temple was demolished by the religious of the Lérins, and a convent erected instead, which, in its turn, was destroyed by the Saracens. A chapel with an open arcaded porch now marks the spot (Fig. 147), which, surrounded as it is with ancient cypresses and pines, is one of the best designed structures of the kind in the district. Small open-air chapels or shrines of this description, with arcaded porches, are very common all over the Riviera, and often form very pleasing objects in the landscape, occupying, as they frequently do, somewhat prominent sites. They are almost invariably in a late Renaissance style of architecture. CANNES is the one of the health resorts which has perhaps made the greatest progress within the last fifty years, having developed from the small fishing village which Lord Brougham found it in 1831, when he erected the first English villa, into a town of fine residences and splendid hotels extending for about four miles along the coast, and rising on the wooded hills, or nestling in the sheltered ravines which seam their flanks. Like most of the towns on the Riviera, Cannes owed its first existence to a rocky eminence in the middle of a bay, forming at once a naturally sheltered harbour and a suitable site for a fortification for its defence (Fig. 148). It is therefore probably a place of very ancient origin, and was in all likelihood the primitive Ligurian settlement of Ægitna, where the Roman Consul Quintus Opimius obtained a victory over the Ligurian tribes B.C. 155. The town was then handed over to the Massiliotes, the allies of the Romans, and went by the name of Castrum [Illustration: FIG. 148. BAY OF CANNES AND THE ESTERELLE MOUNTAINS.]