Prince's Palace of Monaco

Where it sits. The palace occupies the seaward end of Le Rocher, the limestone headland that juts 800 metres into the Mediterranean and rises 62 metres out of it, splitting Monaco's shoreline into the Port Hercule on one side and the reclaimed district of Fontvieille on the other. From the Place du Palais in front, the drop to the harbour is sheer on two sides. The square is paved in geometric bands of coloured stone, hedged with cannon that Louis XIV gave to the Grimaldis and with pyramids of cannonballs, and it gives one of the best free views on the whole coast: the yachts below, the tower blocks of Monte-Carlo across the water, Cap Martin beyond, and on a clear day the Italian coast running away to the east.

The story behind it. The Genoese built a fortress on this rock in 1215 to control the shipping lane. On 8 January 1297 François Grimaldi, exiled from Genoa, took it by trick — arriving at the gate dressed as a Franciscan and drawing a sword once inside. The Grimaldis have held Monaco, with interruptions, ever since, which makes this the longest continuously ruling dynasty in Europe and the palace one of very few in the world still functioning as the working residence of the family that built it. The fortress was gradually softened into a Renaissance palace: the Cour d'Honneur received its double horseshoe staircase in Carrara marble in 1656, modelled on the one at Fontainebleau, and the galleries around the courtyard were frescoed in the sixteenth century. Those frescoes were whitewashed over, forgotten, and rediscovered during restoration work that began in 2015 — a decade-long project that has uncovered several hundred square metres of Genoese Mannerist painting, including a Hercules cycle, in what is now called the Galerie d'Hercule.

On screen. No European palace has a tighter link to Hollywood. Grace Kelly, then the reigning star at MGM and fresh from an Academy Award for The Country Girl, came to Cannes in May 1955 as part of the American delegation to the film festival. A photo shoot arranged by Paris Match brought her along the coast to be photographed with Prince Rainier III at this palace. They married eleven months later, in April 1956, in two ceremonies — a civil one in the palace's throne room and a religious one the next day in the cathedral a few hundred metres up the rock. MGM, which still held her contract, filmed the wedding and released it; an estimated thirty million people watched, one of the first genuinely global live broadcasts. Kelly never made another picture. Alfred Hitchcock tried to bring her back for Marnie in 1962, and she wanted to do it, but the reaction in the principality to their princess playing a compulsive thief killed the plan. The irony is thick: the year before she met Rainier, Kelly had been filming To Catch a Thief on the roads immediately above this rock, playing a woman falling for a jewel thief on the Riviera. The 2014 film Grace of Monaco, with Nicole Kidman, dramatised the Marnie episode, opened the Cannes festival, and was publicly repudiated by the Grimaldi family as fiction; it was shot around Monaco and in studios, not inside the palace.

What you actually see today. Visitors are admitted to the state apartments on a self-guided audio route, generally from spring to autumn, subject to the court calendar — when the sovereign is in residence for official business, sections close at short notice. The route takes in the Cour d'Honneur with its three million pebbles laid in geometric patterns, the horseshoe staircase, the Galerie d'Hercule, the blue-and-gold Throne Room where Monégasque weddings and investitures take place, the York Room, the Mazarin Room panelled in polychrome wood, and the Palatine Chapel of 1656. Photography inside is restricted. Outside, the Carabiniers du Prince mount the changing of the guard on the Place du Palais at 11.55 each morning, a compact ceremony lasting about ten minutes that draws a dense crowd from 11.30.

The rest of the rock. Monaco-Ville around the palace is the oldest quarter and the only part of the principality that still reads as a Mediterranean old town: narrow lanes, small squares, and almost no traffic. The Cathedral of Our Lady Immaculate, finished in 1875 in white stone quarried at La Turbie, holds the tombs of the Grimaldi princes, including Rainier III and Grace, whose grave is marked simply with her Latinised name and is almost always covered in flowers. The Oceanographic Museum, opened in 1910 by Prince Albert I and directed for years by Jacques Cousteau, is built into the cliff face on the seaward side and drops eighty-five metres to the water.

Getting there and timing. From Monaco-Monte-Carlo station it is a twenty-minute walk or a short ride on bus 1 or 2; public lifts inside the rock save the climb. Arrive before 11.15 for the guard change, or after four in the afternoon when the tour groups have gone and the light on the harbour is at its best.