Nice

Nice is the one I send people to when they want the Riviera without having to pick a single village and commit to it. It’s a proper city, the fifth largest in France, with museums and markets and a food culture entirely its own, and it sits right in the middle of the most photogenic forty kilometres of coast in Europe. Stay here and Monaco, Villefranche, Èze, Antibes and Saint-Paul are all a short hop away, so you get all the glamour without any of the isolation.

What I love most is the thing people overlook: Nice isn’t really French. It was Niçois, then Savoyard, then Italian in everything but paperwork until 1860, and you can still taste that in the food and see it in the ochre and apricot facades of the old town. The city was inscribed on the UNESCO list in 2021 as the Winter Resort Town of the Riviera, for the grid, the villas and the Promenade des Anglais, which is a lovely way of saying the whole place was built to be beautiful for visitors. And honestly, it still is.

Four nights is my minimum here, and I’d say five if you want day trips that never feel rushed.