Nice

Nice is the one I send people to when they want the Riviera without having to choose a single village and commit to it. It is a proper city – the fifth largest in France – with museums and markets and a food culture entirely its own, and it sits 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, which means you get the glamour without the isolation.

I love it most for the thing people overlook: Nice is not 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 – the grid, the villas, the Promenade des Anglais – which is a nice way of saying the whole place was purpose-built to be beautiful for visitors. It still is.

Four nights is my minimum here, five if you want day trips that do not feel rushed.