La Turbie

Where it sits. La Turbie is a village of about three thousand people perched at 480 metres on the Grande Corniche, directly above Monaco — so directly that from the terrace beside its Roman monument you look down onto the principality's high-rise roofs, the harbour, and the reclaimed land at Fontvieille, all laid out like a scale model. The village occupies the saddle where the coastal ridge dips, which is precisely why the Romans put their road and their boundary marker here. Behind it the ground rises to the Tête de Chien, a 550-metre limestone bluff with a nineteenth-century fort, and the Parc départemental de la Grande Corniche spreads north across scrub and pine.

The Trophy of Augustus. The stump on the hill is the Tropaeum Alpium, raised by decree of the Roman Senate in 6 BC to mark the completion of Augustus's subjugation of the Alpine tribes. It stood about fifty metres high: a square podium carrying the dedicatory inscription, a circular colonnaded drum of twenty-four Doric columns, a stepped cone, and a statue of Augustus on top. The inscription named forty-five defeated peoples, and because Pliny the Elder copied it into his Natural History the text survived the monument's ruin and could be recut on the restored podium. The trophy sat exactly on the frontier between Italia and Gallia and beside the Via Julia Augusta, so every traveller between Rome and the Rhône passed beneath it. It was fortified in the Middle Ages, blown up on the orders of Louis XIV in 1705, and then quarried for two centuries — the village church is built partly from its stone. Restoration ran from 1905 to 1933, funded largely by the American philanthropist Edward Tuck, whose name the site museum still carries.

On screen, and the road below. La Turbie belongs to the Riviera's film geography twice over. The Grande Corniche through the village is one of the roads Hitchcock used for To Catch a Thief (1955), the film in which Grace Kelly drives Cary Grant along these cliffs at a speed that terrifies him and delights her. Twenty-seven years later, on 13 September 1982, Princess Grace of Monaco lost control of her Rover P6 while descending from the family's farm at Roc Agel toward Monaco and went over the edge on a hairpin below La Turbie; she died the following day. The coincidence has fused the two events in popular memory, usually inaccurately. The crash did not happen on the Moyenne Corniche, which is the road most often named in retellings, and it did not happen on the stretch Hitchcock filmed. It happened on the D37, the narrow, steeply graded link road that drops from the La Turbie area toward Cap-d'Ail — a lane with tight bends, a poor camber and long unguarded drops. The site is unmarked and locals discourage the small trade in visitors who look for it.

What you actually see today. The medieval village behind the monument is a compact grid of vaulted alleys entered through two surviving gateways, with the Rue Comte-de-Cessole running the length of it under arches. The Baroque church of Saint-Michel-Archange, built between 1764 and 1777 on an oval plan, holds a good collection of paintings including works attributed to the Bréa school and a striking agate and onyx altar. The archaeological site itself is compact: a museum of models and fragments, a path around the podium, and a viewing terrace on the seaward side. Allow an hour and a half. On a clear day the panorama runs from the Esterel massif in the west, past Cap-Ferrat and the Monaco headland, to the Italian coast beyond Bordighera.

Practicalities and the walk. La Turbie is a fifteen-minute drive from Monaco up the D53, or roughly thirty-five minutes from Nice along the Grande Corniche — one of the great short drives in Europe, with the whole coast unrolling below the left-hand parapet. Bus 11 and 116 serve the village from Nice and Monaco but run infrequently, so check the return before you commit. Walkers can climb from Monaco on the old mule path in about an hour and a quarter, gaining 450 metres; the Parc de la Grande Corniche behind the village has marked trails through maquis with the Mont Agel military installation on the skyline.

Timing. The monument site opens year-round but closes at lunchtime out of season. Morning light falls on the seaward face and is best for photographs of the drum against the water; late afternoon puts the sun behind Monaco and turns the whole gulf into silhouette. Spring brings wild orchids to the park slopes above the village, and the village keeps its own quiet festival calendar around the feast of Saint Michael at the end of September.