Mentioning Menton

Believe it or not, my busyness (or slack) was not the reason I have not posted in about a month. I was away on vacation in the South of France with Alain. When away, I don't take a computer, as I have mentioned in a previous vacation post, but I do manage to take a lot of pictures. It is not always easy to decide to put vacation photos on here since this is supposed to be a blog about the beauty of Paris and yet, it is a blog about me at the same time. Paris is a lovely city as everyone knows, but France is a lovely country filled with other lovely cities. I learn this again and again when I travel around the country and discover, and yes, fall in love with another city, or even tiny hilltop village. Everyone knows, or at least heard about, the South of France, or more specific the Côte d'Azur (French Riviera). I am talking about St. Tropez to Nice. People know of Nice, Cannes, Monte Carlo or even Antibes. These have always been places of far away dreams for Americans especially ones around in the 50's-60's. Well, even before, since legendary American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemmingway rested, or took up residence there during the Jazz Age. This part of the world has been a magnet for years for various reasons and on this trip I began to first understand why, or at least get a taste.

Menton is the city in these photos. It is not a huge city but it is the last large French city you have before hitting the Italian border. I found it completely charming with unbelievable color and small scale grandeur, if there is such a thing. It is like a small Nice, and Nice...well, I should save my feeling about Nice for another post, but suffice to say I like Nice quite a lot. Menton has it's old part still beautifully intact with just the right amount of wear. Turn a corner and a stage-set seems to open up. Tiny pedestrian streets seem to all go uphill. At one time a church bell rang and I thought of Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, scaling the Dome of St. Peters, full of energy and excitement. That is what my heart felt, even if my lungs had another feeling altogether. I clicked away at everything, while still trying to see things first hand enough to really enjoy and not just through the camera lense. This is not always easy. Even in the heat, I wanted to see more. Alain advised me to pace myself because he wanted to show me two more cities and that Menton was just a starter. Hmm...I was a little disapponted to leave. Next on the list was Monaco.

The traffic into Monaco was a nightmare. It seemed to take for hours. It was ssstttoooppp and then ggggoooooo all the way. I was so turned off that I missed our passing through Monte Carlo. In Monaco, while everyone wants to either see the Royal Palace, the cathedral where Princese Grace married, and is now buried, the casinos or just to experience the kind of wealth such a place offers, I only wanted to see one thing. It is a garden called the Botanique Jardin d'Exotique, or something close to that. It is a cliff hugging garden perched high above with the most exquiste cacti and succulent plants on Earth. I remember once seeing photos of the place in an old travel book. It looked, well...exotic and strange and beautiful at the same time. I had to photograph it myself. Those photos are also for a future posting. I was not disappointed. It was worth the hassle to get into Monaco, which in the end I did not find very interesting. It is something of a french Geneva. It is pretty, clean and in the end a little souless to me. I like a little grit and I did not find it there. Sure, grit probably exists in a casino backroom, or some over-the-top yacht docked in the marina, but walking through the city/country, I could see the beauty there in it's architecture, or the glamourous idea of a beautiful American actress falling in love, marrying a prince and becoming even more iconic, but with all the tourists photographing the changing of the guard...I just wanted to leave. Eze was next.

Eze is one of those true hilltop villages. It is dark and brown and seems like it should not exist anymore. It's passageway like streets are about an arms stretch wide.We got there as the hordes were leaving so it is refreshingly quite and even cool there. I liked Eze. It's sleepy and to use an old fashioned word, quaint. They have an exotic garden there as well, almost identical to the one in Monaco. By then I had almost cacti-ed myself into a coma, but I managed to get a few shots in. By the end, Alain and I were ready to go for dinner. I felt over stimulated, but was to learn this was only the begining and I still had a good two weeks of this. I will post more photos in the coming days. I am rested, back in Paris, but still wishing I was back there where the waters are the most beautiful turquoise. Well, at least I have my photos.