Italian at Heart

With a population approaching 350,000, Nice is the fifth-largest city in France. It is also one of the liveliest, prettiest and most seductive. It nicknames itself, without false modesty, “La Bella”--The Beautiful.

But the heart of this sunny metropolis, historically, culturally, and in popular sentiment, if not exactly geographically, is the section known as Vieux Nice, or Old Nice--which looks and feels more like an Italian hill town than a neighborhood in the largest city on the Co^te d’ Azur.

Seen from the air, Vieux Nice stands out from the surrounding neighborhoods, by virtue of its uniformly red-tiled roofs, in a shape suggesting a plump bird sitting upright--its feet resting on the Quai des Etats-Unis (which runs along the sea), its breast pressing lightly against an elevation called the Colline de Cha^teau, or Cha^teau Hill. On the ground, it is a warren of tiny, sometimes mysterious-seeming streets, curving almost imperceptibly beneath narrow wrought-iron balconies, open shutters, flower boxes and strings of laundry, and opening occasionally into picture-perfect little squares. The colors of the buildings are earthy, but distilled into memorable hues: a kind of dusty canary yellow, the beige of desert sand, a pink both soft and luminous, a startling saturated terra cotta called rouge sarde, Sardinian red.

There are shops everywhere, selling not just souvenirs and local crafts but also fish, meat, cheese, pasta, coffee, bread, ice cream; there are bars, cafes and scores of modest restaurants. Along the side of Vieux Nice, which opens, through occasional arched passageways, to the quay and the Mediterranean beyond, runs a long, cafe-lined pedestrian esplanade called the Cours Saleya, animated six mornings a week by one of the more vividly attractive open-air flower, fruit and vegetable markets in Europe.

The buildings of Vieux Nice are rarely more than five or six stories high, but they’re densely concentrated, and the streets are narrow. The result is that the visitor feels enclosed--in a sense more comforting than claustrophobic--almost as if this were a walled city. Both the bustle of the rest of Nice and the flashy extravagance of the nearby resort towns seem far away.

Vieux Nice can itself be full of life and color, particularly on its main streets--the Rue Saint-Francois-de-Paule, the Rue de la Prefecture, the Rue Droite and the Rue Benoi^t-Bunico, among others, and certainly the Cours Saleya. Along these byways, tourists mingle with local shoppers; ne’er-do-wells linger at tiny cafe tables over pastis and Gauloises; serious-looking businessmen pause to inspect an array of terrines and savory tarts in a shop window. You might see a baker trudging past, carrying two huge sacks of flour; a painter painstakingly lacquering shutters on the door to an apartment building in another of Nice’s trademark hues, a kind of bright-blue-tinged pistachio; a gaggle of children scampering up a steep alleyway on the side of the hill on their way home from school.

Both the de facto capital of the French Riviera, or Co^te d’Azur, and the official capital of the departement of the Alpes-Maritimes, Nice curves gracefully around a wide, blue Mediterranean bight called the Baie des Anges, or Bay of the Angels. There are elegant villas and impressive churches in almost every quarter of the city, and Nice is a veritable treasurehouse of art. (The elegant hilltop quarter of Cimiez alone boasts museums devoted to both Matisse and Chagall.)

Nice was born on a nearby hill, on what was to become the Cha^teau Hill. It was on that site that Phocaean Greek traders from Marseilles founded a settlement in the 4th century BC, naming it Nikaia, after the goddess of victory. A rival Roman settlement on the hill of Cimiez, a few miles inland, was far grander than Nikaia, with a temple, an extensive complex of baths, and an arena where as many as 4,000 spectators at a time could watch gladiators battle. Precisely because of its grandeur, though, the Roman colony was ravaged by barbarian invasions--and it was Nikaia that ultimately evolved into Nice. (The cha^teau for which the hill is named was destroyed in 1706; the hilltop is now a handsome park, with unparalleled views of the coast and the foothills of the Alps).

In 1388, Nice, while retaining its identity as a comte or county, became part of the Kingdom of Savoy. The Savoyards’ capital was Turin, and it was through them that the city in general, and Vieux Nice in particular, got its strong Italian flavor. Strictly speaking (and despite what you will frequently be told), Nice was never part of Italy, however. Its citizens voted to become French in a plebescite held in 1860--the year that Italy was united into a modern nation. But Italian was the city’s official language from 1561 until the union with France, and the principal architectural style in Nice is Italian Baroque. (It is the only Baroque city in France.) Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of the founders of the Italian state, once said “to deny the Italianness of Nice is like denying the light of the sun.”

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Certainly no one strolling through Vieux Nice today could fail to recognize its Italian character. Shops bear names like Fantino, Ricci-Gagliolo, Caprioglio and Fuscielli. The major square is the Place Rossetti, and there is another one named for Garibaldi. Shops sell fresh pasta (especially tiny ravioli in various colors), ready-made Italian-style pizza (as well as the local equivalent, the delicious onion-and-anchovy tart called pissaladiere), and huge hunks of parmigiana cheese. The local language, a Provencal dialect called Nissart--sometimes heard on the Cours Saleya--sounds unmistakably Italianate, all vowels and musical cadences.

And the churches of Vieux Nice, each a little masterpiece, would look absolutely at home across the border in Piedmont or Liguria. The largest of these is the cathedral of Sainte Reparate, which commands one flank of the cafe-filled Place Rossetti. The facade of Sainte-Reparate is elegantly tall and slender, and busy with elements: flat columns in deep relief; five large niches holding statuary; a high, paned clerestory window; a monumental doorway; accents of light, earthy green and golden ocher. There is a multicolored tile dome posed discreetly in the middle of the roof (it isn’t visible from in front of the cathedral) and a separate bell tower, soaring higher than the church itself and seemingly unrelated, with its plain lines and colors of white and stone. Inside, Sainte Reparate is surprisingly austere--until you peer into its side chapels, which are exuberantly Baroque. In one, devoted to the Blessed Sacrament, there is a marble retable (the platform above the altar) supported by sinuously twisted columns, said to be modeled after nothing less than a work by Bernini in St. Peter’s in Rome.

In addition to its ecclesiastical architecture, Vieux Nice once boasted dozens of little palaces and noble houses, mostly dating from the 17th and 18th centuries--but over the centuries, almost all of these have been converted into prosaic civic buildings or apartment blocks, their once-ornate interiors gutted and remade. It’s always worth peering into open doors and courtyards on the chance that you’ll glimpse some particularly nice staircase or window or fountain--but all that remains of most past palaces is an oversized sculptured marble door frame, seemingly incongruous on the facade of what is today an otherwise drab-looking structure. The Palais Lascaris on the Rue Droite is an exception. It may be visited only as part of a guided tour, which then continues on for a brief walking tour of Vieux Nice as a whole. (This is in French only, alas, but worth taking even if you don’t understand the language, just for what you can see.)

Like many Nicois palaces of the same era, it boasts an exquisite grand staircase with slate steps and marble balustrades (giving way to wooden banisters on the upper floors), as well as a smaller but scarcely less impressive “back” stairway. Both open onto interior courtyards, illuminating the heart of the palace.

The ceilings are high and vaulted, and the rooms are somehow imposing without being overwhelming. In the salon d’honneur, where honored guests were welcomed, for instance, there is a powerful fresco overhead, highlighted with gold leaf. In the main bedroom, visitors can’t help noticing how short the bed is. That, explains the guide, is because the fashion in the heyday of the Lascaris family was for nobles to sleep sitting up--to avoid mimicking the position of death (lying down), to aid digestion after a big dinner and, in the case of the women, so as not to muss those enormously complicated coiffures they affected.

On a more spiritual note, the walking tour that proceeds from the Palais Lascaris sometimes includes another beautiful church, the Chapelle de la Misericorde (Chapel of Mercy) on the Cours Saleya. Privately owned, and difficult to visit if you’re not on this tour, the chapel is a much smaller structure than Sainte Reparate, with two rounded naves, one behind the other, and a skylight gallery beneath a small dome. What seems to be an extravagance of marble, however, is not: Except for two columns and the floors and railings, everything is astonishing trompe l’oeil stucco.

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Just outside, six mornings a week, beneath awnings striped in red, green, blue and orange, one of the best and liveliest flower and produce markets in France sets up on the Cours Saleya. (Every Monday, the food market gives way to a terrific flea market, with a hundred or more stands selling everything from junky hardware and old magazines to Lalique crystal and antique cameras. There are also booksellers, art dealers, jewelry merchants, purveyors of old postcards, specialists in linen and lace--including wonderful old baby clothes--and even a man selling clothing labels displayed in an album like stamps. You can buy, for instance, a tiny alligator-themed Lacoste label from the 1950s for about $30.)

The tenor of the market, of course, depends on the season. In early February, there are pears and apples, lemons and oranges, lettuces and cabbages, a few long-stemmed leaf-wrapped baby artichokes and fava beans (from Spain or Italy, and expensive), and lacy clumps of frisee, their yellow-white interiors improbably bright. By early May, there are favas everywhere, artichokes galore, fat carrots, shiny onions, braids of longstem garlic, deep green zucchini with brilliant orange flowers attached, asparagus in green, white and deep, inky purple. By midsummer, the market is in full flower, bursting with a surfeit of cherries, peaches, melons, nectarines, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, asparagus, zucchini, even cascades of early mushrooms. In fall, the mushrooms have multiplied--cepes, girolles, pieds-de-mouton, pleurottes--and there are pears and apples again, and heaps of onions, and cabbages and all their cousins. And always, all year-round, there are herbs and cheeses and, above all, olives--the famous little local ones and also an extravagance of imports from other parts of France and from Italy, Spain, and Greece--black, green, purple, almost gray, almost red, and spicy, fleshy, sour, mild. Their perfume overwhelms even that of the tuberoses and the basil.

And there is always socca. Socca is Nice’s favorite and definitive, street food. It is a kind of crumbly cre^pe, made of chickpea (garbanzo) flour, olive oil, and water, cooked in what looks like huge paella pans, then cut into wedges, dusted generously with black pepper, and served in irregular pieces in paper cones. Socca is sold at a permanent stand on one side of the market, but also from a temporary one under a market awning--an outpost of a small food shop in Vieux Nice called Chez Therese. It’s more fun here, because the woman who dispenses it is a real market character, always bantering, cajoling, joshing, as she dishes out her specialty at 10 francs (about $2) per cone. What does socca taste like? It could be described as earthy and faintly sweet--but I prefer to think of it as Italiante and a bit mysterious. I prefer to think that it has, in a way, the flavor of Vieux Nice.

* AROUND NICE: Three day trips from the city, through some of the best scenery in Europe. L12

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GUIDEBOOK: A Nice Time

Where to stay: The Ho^tel La Perouse (11 Quai Rauba-Capeu; tel. 011-33-9362-3463, fax 011-33-9362-5941), on the bay-facing side of the Cha^teau Hill, a few steps from the Cours Saleya; summer rates, $180-$270 for two. The Primotel Suisse (15 Quai Rauba-Capeu; tel. 011-33-9362-3300, fax 011-33-9385-3070), a budget-priced alternative next door; $95-$120 for two, including breakfast.

Where to eat: Barale (39 Rue Beaumont), just outside Vieux Nice near the port (about $80 for two).

Don Camillo (5 Rue des Ponchettes; tel. 9385-6795), a tiny, family-run restaurant ($120 for two, food only).

La Merenda (4 Rue de la Terrasse), perfectly cooked Nicois dishes ($80 for two, food only).

Nissa Socca (5 Rue Sainte-Reparate; tel. 9380-1835), a hole-in-the-wall pizza-and-socca emporium ($25-$40 for two, food only).

Le Safari (1 Cours Saleya; tel. 9380-1844), good fish, roasted meats, and the best pizza in town ($40-$120 for two, food only).

--C.A.