I spent two days in Nice on my way to England
to check out the reasons for the massacre there. There were several more
killings by Muslims in Europe before and after I arrived.
Nice is enchanting, even though seaside resorts usually repel me, but I missed
the opportunity to go to the public housing areas or talk to enough people
about the massacre that had taken place so recently. Flowers piled up at the
grandstand at a memorial for the dead. My waiter at the Hotel Negresco was traumatised
by seeing children killed before his eyes as he served guests in the garden beside the Promenade des Anglais
What did I expect to learn? It seemed
the France of films, books and paintings. Some women in headscarves. Not very
many. I was told Muslims do not live in a specific part of town. I should have
found out more but I was on holiday and it was very hot.
Nice is cheap to get to and its gracious early nineteenth century architecture
is exhilarating. A great, quick and very beautiful train ride takes you along
wonderful coast to Monaco, Menton and Italy.
Monaco I had been warned is awful and it is dull and ugly, slightly like Durres
in Albania, but with less interesting people. A friend who grew up in Monaco told me it was ruined in the
1960s by Arab money. Arabs in Monaco are rich, while those in the South of France are poor.
A nice, elderly British couple I met on the bus, who have lived there since 1968, told me that Monaco had been spoilt, too. Their children hated the place and escaped at the first
opportunity.
The husband had captained Aristotle Onassis's yacht.
Just so you know, Jackie Kennedy, whom
they only met once, was pleasant but the wife didn’t understood why
Onassis could have been interested in her after Callas.
By accident I wandered into what is a
famous hotel, the Hotel De Paris, old mahogany and very rich people, where food in the bar is reasonably priced
and, I am told, is wonderful. I didn't like the ambience on a sunny afternoon. As in Dubai, the action goes on in hotels. And in the Casino.
I had assumed Monaco was a relic of the Holy Roman Empire, like the long gone principality of Orange, but in fact it is the tiny rump of an Italian princely state that got lost.
An old bound volume of the Cornhill Magazine of 1864, that I later picked up in a charity shop in England, filled me in on her history. Atrociously misgoverned and over-taxed by the House of Grimaldi, the little country rebelled against them and they were left with only the sliver around Monte Carlo, where dependants of the princely house lived.
The rest of what had been Monaco joined France. The little rump of Monaco, since it was separated from Italy by the time Napoleon III took Savoy, as his payment for enabling Italian unification, remained independent. The Casino became its source of income.
My great anti-hero Sir Basil Zaharoff, who rose from being a fireman and, probably, thief in Constantinople to being the richest arms dealer in the world, later bought the Casino and effectively the little country. He paid the prince a salary. In the Great War, Zaharoff owned the largest arms manufacturing firms in Britain, France, Austria and Germany and was knighted for his efforts.
Sydney Reilly on whom Ian Fleming modelled James Bond also loitered in Monte and it figures in many Edwardian detective stories, as well as the famous song, The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. I hoped it would have some charm left, but it didn't.
The
old bits of the little town are Disneyfied and the whole place seems like Benidorm
for money launderers. People watching is probably the best reason to go - if
you want to see rich crooks and Romanian starlets. A rich Romanian friend complains that it is teems with politically connected Romanian gypsies. She nevertheless goes back and loves the place.
It has the attraction for East European rich that
it is a symbol, like cigars and cravats,
of the Communist caricature of plutocracy. And the attraction of raw,
semi-legal money, without class, has a sexual vibe for some women. It is very nouveau riche, cheaply expensive.
Materialistic Romanian girls are
decorative. That is the point of them. And most have fled Romania but the
species can still be found in Bucharest, often grown older and married to
money. And people spotting is not my thing and a night time activity.
I looked
round the hideous nineteenth century cathedral, glanced at the outside of the
palace and was relieved to get back to the station, my work done.
And took the train - again a wonderful
journey - to Ventimiglia, on the advice of a friend who said that, because of migrants
massing at the border, the train station
there seems like a Mogadishu slum.
Not
so. I saw only the few African street vendors who add unexpected colour to the
scene in every Italian town these days,
like the black king in paintings of the Magi. I was told they stopped massing
near the frontier a years ago, were somewhere in the woods and had rarely been
seen. A couple of days later though the BBC published stories about the place
becoming the new Calais.
Monaco is my sixty second country, unless you count Transnistria, which I don't, or South Africa where my plane
picked up passengers. Counting countries, an increasingly common hobby these days, like all collecting, is a form of
madness. It's a middle aged male thing. Specifically, as Wilhelm Stekel said, it is a sublimation of the desire to possess many women.
Sybille Bedford said rightly that France
and Italy are the two classics of travel. They really are and from Nice both
can be enjoyed. But it is Ventimiglia that I want to revisit not the elegance of the French riviera. Ventimiglia is quite wonderful, old, beautiful, unglobalised for now, not elegant, Italian. It has style, which means it is itself. Unlike Monte Carlo.
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