August 2022 Six Weeks in the French Riviera My apartment is in Nice, but with so many interesting places around I've been jumping from little town to little town. Cannes is famous for the film festival and for the beautiful beach, but it also has an old part of town worth exploring. Vallauris is tiny village known for its pottery, where you can see Picasso's painting La Guerre et La Paix. Antibes is charming ancient town where you can find lots of art galleries and also the old palace where Picasso lived for a while, now a museum with many of his paintings. Biot is small village known for its glass work and home of the Musée Fernand Léger. Cagnes-sur-Mer reminded me of Cocoon, because of the large number of retired people walking around. Renoir also spent his last years there and his house is now a museum. Èze is a medieval village on top of a mountain, with a great view of the sea. For those brave enough, there is the Chemin de Nietzsche, a very steep and rocky climb of over 2 km where the old moustachioed philosopher used to walk. Menton is the last large place before reaching Italy, and it has a beautiful old town and a museum dedicated to Jean Cocteau, who lived there for a while. Nice is the largest city in the area, full of attractions and full of tourists. My apartment is in a neighborhood called Carabacel, far enough from the touristic hubbub but only a short walk to the beach and the best restaurants. There also the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain (MAMAC) only two blocks from my front door. Matisse used to live in Nice (you can visit his house, now a museum) and died here (you can visit his grave in the Cimetière de Cimiez). Can que noun camina, noun trova d’ouòs After months of hearing Bulgarian and Romanian, French sounded like a very familiar language. I'm not fully fluent, but can hold conversations with the locals and even read a book or two (I found a couple of good Boileau-Nercejac novels in a nearby bookstore -- if you don't know who they are, ask Google). But Nice has its own language, a dialect called Niçard, which is a subdialect of Provençal, which is a dialect of Occitan (or Langue d'Oc). Only people born and raised here speak it, mostly older people. The rhythm reminds me of Catalan, and the few words I can understand sound like a mix of Italian and French. By the way, "can que noun camina, noun trova d’ouòs" means "dog that doesn't walk doesn't find bones" in Niçard. Cuisine Nissarde The food here is, as expected (it's France, after all), is very good. There are several dishes originally from Nice that are delicious. The most famous (and the one I have had the most) is probably the salade niçoise: tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, tuna, anchovies, cucumbers, green peppers, black olives. Or you can get a round loaf of local bread and put the whole salade niçoise inside it, it's called pan bagnat. Another famous dish invented in Nice is the ratatouille, a vegetable stew rich in zucchini and eggplant. They also use zucchini to make the popular beignets de courgettes, which are battered and fried and totally different from the sweet beignets you have for breakfast in New Orleans. I have also been drinking French wine, of course. Mostly Bandol, produced near Toulon here in the Provence region, made from a grape called Mourvèdre. And any market here always has bottles of good Cahors or Bordeaux for prices you can't resist, so I don't resist. And after Nice? Next week I will move to Firenze, capital of Tuscany and birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. A presto! Copyright © 2022 Nemo Nox, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.