Menton

Where it sits. Menton is the last French town before Italy, wedged into a south-facing amphitheatre between the Maritime Alps and the sea, eight kilometres east of Monaco and a few hundred metres from the frontier at Ponte San Luigi. The mountains behind it — the Berceau ridge and the Baousse Roussa — rise steeply enough to block the northerly mistral entirely, and the result is the mildest climate in metropolitan France. Frost is close to unknown; the mean January temperature runs several degrees above Nice, forty kilometres west. That microclimate is why citrus grows here commercially when it will not survive further along the coast, and why nineteenth-century physicians sent tubercular patients to Menton rather than anywhere else in Europe.

The story behind it. The town belonged to the Grimaldis of Monaco from 1346, declared itself a free city in 1848, and was sold to France by Prince Charles III in 1861 in the same transaction that gave up Roquebrune. Almost immediately it became a wintering resort for the British and the Russians. The doctor James Henry Bennet published a book on the climate in 1861 that effectively created the market, and by 1900 Menton had a Russian Orthodox church, an Anglican church, grand hotels along the front and a ring of villas with botanical gardens attached. Katherine Mansfield spent the winters of 1920 and 1921 at the Villa Isola Bella writing some of her best stories; Aubrey Beardsley died in the town in 1898. The old town, packed onto the hill above the harbour, predates all of it: tall, narrow, ochre and salmon houses stacked in tiers around the Rue Longue, the old Roman road.

Cinema and Jean Cocteau. Menton's claim on film history runs through one man. Jean Cocteau — poet, painter, and the director of La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Orphée (1950) — attached himself to the town in the 1950s and left more work here than anywhere else. He decorated the Salle des Mariages in the Hôtel de Ville between 1957 and 1958, covering the walls with a wedding scene of Provençal figures, panther skins on the ceiling and mock leopard carpet, so that couples still marry inside a Cocteau set. He then converted the Bastion, a squat seventeenth-century fort built by the Grimaldis to guard the harbour entrance, into a museum of his own work; it opened in 1966, three years after his death, with pebble mosaics he designed laid into the surrounding pavement. A larger museum by the architect Rudy Ricciotti, built to hold the Séverin Wunderman collection of some 1,500 Cocteau works, opened on the seafront in 2011 and was flooded and closed by Storm Alex in October 2020. The Bastion continues to show the collection in rotation. Menton itself has stood in for the generic pastel Riviera and for Italian coastal towns in French productions for decades, helped by a waterfront that has changed very little since the 1930s.

What you actually see today. The old town's set piece is the Parvis Saint-Michel, a small square between the Basilique Saint-Michel-Archange and the Chapelle des Pénitents Blancs, paved in a mosaic of black and white beach pebbles laid in the Grimaldi coat of arms. The basilica, built between 1619 and 1675, is Baroque with a bell tower added in 1701 and a nave of pink and gold; the square in front hosts the chamber music festival every August, with the audience seated on the pebbles and the sea behind the stage. Steps climb on to the Cimetière du Vieux-Château, laid out on the site of the medieval castle, where the graves of nineteenth-century British, Russian and German invalids look out over the whole bay — and where William Webb Ellis, credited with inventing rugby, is buried. Below, the Marché des Halles of 1898 sells the town's lemons, and the long pebble beach of the Promenade du Soleil runs west toward Cap Martin.

The gardens. Menton has more significant botanical gardens per square kilometre than anywhere else in France. Serre de la Madone was made from 1924 by Lawrence Johnston, who also created Hidcote in England, and is the most beautiful: terraces, pools and rare plants collected on expeditions to China and South Africa. Val Rahmeh, now run by the national natural history museum, holds a specimen of Sophora toromiro, a tree extinct in the wild on Easter Island. Fontana Rosa was built by the Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and is covered in ceramic tilework honouring writers. Maria Serena sits at the frontier itself.

Getting there and timing. Menton has two stations on the Nice–Ventimiglia line, with trains roughly every half hour and a journey time of about thirty-five minutes from Nice. Bus 100 crawls along the coast road from Monaco. The Fête du Citron, running for about three weeks from mid-February, fills the Jardins Biovès with enormous figures built from lemons and oranges wired to steel frames and draws several hundred thousand people; hotels book out and the town is joyfully overwhelmed. Outside that window the place is quiet even in summer, when the crowds concentrate west of Monaco.