The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable RuinsAllen, Grant
History
The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins
Allen, Grant
Europe, Southern -- Description and travel; Mediterranean Region -- Description and travel
specks along the crowded Promenade, and the band is playing gaily in the
Public Garden; but up there you look across to the eternal hills, and feel
yourself face to face for one moment with the Eternities behind them.
One may descend from the summit either by the ancient cemetery or by the
Place Garibaldi, through bosky gardens of date-palm, fan-palm, and agave.
Cool winding alleys now replace the demolished ramparts, and lovely views
open out on every side as we proceed over the immediate foreground.
At the foot of the Castle Hill, a modern road, hewn in the solid rock
round the base of the seaward escarpment, connects the Greek with the
Italian town. The angle where it turns the corner, bears on native lips
the quaint Provençal or rather Niçois name of Raüba Capeu or Rob-hat
Point, from the common occurrence of sudden gusts of wind, which remove
the unsuspecting Parisian headgear with effective rapidity, to the great
joy of the observant _gamins_. Indeed, windiness is altogether the weak
point of Nice, viewed as a health-resort; the town lies exposed in the
open valley of the Paillon, down whose baking bed the _mistral_, that
scourge of Provence, sweeps with violent force from the cold mountain-tops
in the rear; and so it cannot for a moment compete in point of climate
with Cannes, Monte Carlo, Mentone or San Remo, backed up close behind by
their guardian barrier of sheltering hills. But not even the _mistral_ can
make those who love Nice love her one atom the less. Her virtues are so
many that a little wholesome bluster once in a while may surely be
forgiven her. And yet the dust does certainly rise in clouds at times from
the Promenade des Anglais.
The Italian city, which succeeds next in order, is picturesque and
old-fashioned, but is being daily transformed and Gallicized out of all
knowledge by its modern French masters. It dates back mainly to the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the population became too dense
for the narrow limits of the small Greek town, and began to overflow,
behind the Castle Hill, on to the eastern banks of the Paillon torrent.
The sea-front in this quarter, now known as the Promenade du Midi, has
been modernized into a mere eastward prolongation of the Promenade des
Anglais, of which "more anon;" but the remainder of the little triangular
space between the Castle Hill and the river-bed still consists of funny
narrow Italian lanes, dark, dense, and dingy, from whose midst rises the
odd and tile-covered dome of the cathedral of St. Réparate. That was the
whole of Nice as it lived and moved till the beginning of this century;
the real Nice of to-day, the Nice of the tourist, the invalid, and the
fashionable world, the Nice that we all visit or talk about, is a purely
modern accretion of some half-dozen decades.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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