Realizing I’m among the privileged who can say I’ve been to the French Riviera three times, the Côte d’Azur is as romantic and dramatic as you’ve imagined. Bustling “big” city Nice is more hectic, while crossing over to the Italian side offers a blessedly more humble, low-key coast — like the chill town of Ventimiglia where I stayed last year — compared to chichi Saint-Tropez or Monaco. Menton is more under-the-radar on the French side, with a fascinating history for thousands of years and impressive architecture on its Mediterranean Sea perch.
I visited this spring and last spring 2025 during the Cannes Film Festival where I even caught a glimpse of the red carpet. But like all my travels, my Riviera experiences were centered by superb meals and one of the best hotels anywhere.
As I share my recommends and highlights, to capture the essence of a place is more complex. Especially one as layered as the Riviera. Yes, it’s for the wealthy, of which I am decidedly not. But the sheer, stunning beauty of the rugged coastline in the South of France is inarguable. Its history is rich, inspiring artists of all art forms for centuries. Its soil grows the vibrant produce the Mediterranean is known for. Its breathtaking collision of shimmering sea, steep cliffs and inland mountains and forests offers the biodiversity few places in the world know (outside of my own unmatched state of California). And the Côte d’Azur’s international mix of expats from around the globe only further buoys its already diverse borderline cultures and languages of France and Italy.
As a girl backpacking around Europe for three months solo in 1999, after countless hours and overnights on the Eurail between countries, I’d start to zone out in some landscapes. Not when I got to the Riviera. With a short, nearly-fated adventure in Nice where I lost my backpack — my lifeline — for a few hours, the glistening coast lured me in as soon as our train started winding along the fabled Mediterranean. Glowing hotels, villas and ancient homes line precipitous, tiered cliffs, while the sea crashes below. I was mesmerized.
Rather than just a destination for the wealthy, the borderline culture of this French-Italian coast boasts a very international population, centered in Nice, the region’s largest city. There is a seamlessness to the melding of my beloved Italia (I am half Sicilian, after all) and France that feels quintessential Riviera.
In 2025 and again in 2026, I’ve been blessed to return and experience the Côte d’Azur as an adult beyond my youthful backpacking adventures. While the name brand shops and elitist crowd of Monaco is so not “my scene,” the romance of the coast, the historic charm of its many villages, the world-class service at its best hotels and restaurants and the soulful people I met daily, from restaurant industry to drivers, drew my heart to the layers beneath the glitz.
Musicians, Writers, Artists & Actors
The Côte d’Azur has long been an artists’ haven, from Festival de Cannes drawing the biggest movie stars in the world annually, to iconic painters like Monet, Picasso and Matisse, who would summer and vacation here, or in the case of Henri Matisse, move to Nice in 1917 and play out much of the rest of his life there. Nice’s Matisse Museum is one of the deeper collections of his paintings, signifying the importance of art and light in this storied region.
The scenery also inspired writers like beloved poet Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Graham Greene (who lived in Antibes for years) and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote his highly personal Tender Is the Night (published 1934) during long stays. His wife Zelda was likewise greatly inspired by the Riviera in her visual art and writing.
Hemingway occasionally veered from his beloved Spain and Paris to take in Riviera life with the Fitzgeralds and others of the Lost Generation. I have long appreciated French author Colette, whose later years were spent living in Saint-Tropez, her sanctuary providing fodder for her writing.
Then there is Hollywood actress Grace Kelly who famously became Princess of Monaco in 1956 when she married Prince Rainier III. She was never my favorite actress, though she starred in some of Hitchcock’s greatest films, “Rear Window” and “Dial M for Murder.” But she was a style icon of my #1 fashion decade, the 1950s. Her tragic death was a heartbreak felt around the world, like Princess Diana’s death in 1997.
At the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo (see below), since 1928 the Bar Américain has drawn the likes of the great Joséphine Baker, who performed here, as well as my beloved Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant and in recent times, Lady Gaga.
Read the rest on Substack: The French Riviera’s Gifts to the World