Villefranche
Category
G
THE TRIP
Visited
Basis
Updated
The short answer
At a glance
Villefranche from the water, in the ochres that have not been allowed to change since the sixteenth century.
Everyone lands in Nice and most people stay there, which is lovely for Nice and extremely convenient for the rest of us. Ten minutes along the coast by train is Villefranche-sur-Mer, an ochre amphitheatre of a village stacked above one of the deepest natural harbours in the Mediterranean – and ten minutes beyond that, the peninsula of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where the money has been quietly hiding since the 1880s.
I shoot a lot of film on this coast and these two are where I keep going back. Villefranche for the lanes and the lunch; Cap Ferrat for the water, the gardens, and a coastal path that is one of the great walks in Europe and that almost nobody does.
Put together they make the best base on the Cote d’Azur – close enough to Nice, Monaco and Eze for anything you want, far enough from all three to actually hear the sea at night.
You’ve reached the quiet door.
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