The capital of the Riviera and fifth
largest city in France,
NICE
scarcely deserves its glittering
reputation. Living off inflated
property values and fat business
accounts, its ruling class has
hardly evolved from the
eighteenth-century Russian and
English aristocrats who first built
their mansions here; today it's the
rentiers
and retired people of various
nationalities whose dividends and
pensions give the city its
startlingly high ratio of per capita
income to economic activity.
Their votes ensured the monopoly
of municipal power held for decades
by the right-wing dynasty, whose
corruption was finally exposed in
1990 when mayor Jacques Médecin
fled to Uruguay. He was finally
extradited and jailed. Despite the
disappearance of 400 million francs
of taxpayers' money, public opinion
remained in his favour. From his
Grenoble prison cell, Médecin, who
had twinned Nice with Cape Town
during the height of South Africa's
apartheid regime, backed the former
Front National member and close
friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jacques
Peyrat, in the 1995 local elections.
Peyrat won with ease.
Politics apart, Nice has other
reasons to qualify it as one of the
more dubious destinations on the
Riviera: it's a pickpocket's
paradise; the traffic is a
nightmare; miniature poodles appear
to be mandatory; phones are always
vandalized; and the beach isn't even
sand. And yet Nice still manages to
be delightful. The sun and the sea
and the laid-back, affable Niçois
cover a multitude of sins. The
medieval rabbit warren of the old
town, the Italianate facades of
modern Nice and the rich, exuberant,
fin-de-siècle residences
that made the city one of Europe's
most fashionable winter retreats
have all survived intact. It has
also retained mementos from its
ancient past, when the Romans ruled
the region from here, and earlier
still, when the Greeks founded the
city. In addition, its bus and train
connections make Nice by far the
best base for visiting the rest of
the Riviera.
The City
of Nice
It doesn't take long to get a feel
for the layout of Nice. Shadowed by
mountains that curve down to the
Mediterranean east of its port, it
still breaks up more or less into
old and new. Vieux Nice , the old
town, groups about the hill of ...
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