Why Nice Is Still the Coolest Spot on the Côte d’Azur: Art, Style, and Riviera Soul

 

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who dream of the Côte d’Azur, and those who haven’t been there yet.

Nice—Nizza, if you’re on your best European behavior—is a coastal seduction wrapped in Riviera light, humming with Mediterranean confidence and layered in a kind of cinematic cool that makes you briefly question your life choices. (Why, again, do we not all live here?)

This is a city where the streets are paved with history, art, and well-moisturized locals. It’s where faded aristocracy meets espresso-fueled chic, and where even the shadows seem to smell faintly of bergamot and sea salt.

But let’s rewind.

Into the Blue (and the Blue, and the Blue)

It begins, like many good things, underground. A dim, escalator-induced ascent from the Nice tram station. It's dark, tunnel-like, vaguely dystopian—until you look up and Romy Schneider is staring at you from a poster in the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMAC), smirking like she knows something you don’t.

Of course she does. She was Romy Schneider.

Inside the Carrara-marble temple that is MAMAC, Warhol rubs frames with Yves Klein’s blue period. Niki de Saint Phalle’s voluminous, joyously rotund sculptures lounge nearby, while Op-Art and film from the ‘60s swirl together in hypnotic, borderline hallucinogenic displays. It’s a collection that doesn’t ask for your attention—it demands it. So I give in.

Then I climb to the rooftop terrace, let the sun slap me in the face, and remember: this is what inspiration feels like when it tans.

Old Town, New Tricks

Nice isn’t just pretty—it’s the kind of pretty that’s been places. The Old Town (Vieux Nice) isn’t precious, it’s primal. Shutters in burnt citrus hues blink open like lazy eyes. Bougainvillea hangs from balconies like nature’s version of mood lighting. You walk—slowly, because the alleys don’t allow for rush—and you smell olives, roses, salt, espresso, and ambition. Sometimes in the same breath.

Forget your phone. Google Maps has no jurisdiction here. You’ll find the Place Rossetti by accident. You’ll follow a saxophone into a sunbeam and end up at a flower market where striped umbrellas shade everything from Moroccan salt to micro-batch goat cheese. And you’ll eat Socca—the chickpea-flour pancake with the texture of a cloud wearing a crispy tuxedo—straight off the tray, with a chilled rosé in hand, wondering if this is what inner peace tastes like.

Spoiler: it is.

The Art of Doing Nothing (Well)

You don’t need to chase culture in Nice. It meets you halfway. It’s Henri Matisse painting his way into immortality in the olive groves of Cimiez. It’s Marc Chagall building a technicolor chapel of dreams, tucked between ruins and orange trees. It’s the way the light touches a Roman wall and makes it glow like gold leaf.

One afternoon I sat in the Jardin du Monastère—alone, under a cypress, flanked by ancient roses and faintly amused cats—and realized I’d spent the last twenty minutes doing absolutely nothing but breathing. And it felt earned.

Cap Ferrat: Where Billionaires and Bohemians Collide

Cap Ferrat is where the Riviera gets, well, Rivierian. It’s where Edith Piaf once whispered into champagne flutes, where Picasso sunburned his nose, and where Baroness Béatrice de Rothschild built her personal Versailles-on-a-cliff—complete with themed gardens, chinoiserie, and more silk than a Milan runway in September.

Her Villa Ephrussi is madness by design: a Rococo fantasy smuggled into reality. One moment you’re walking past lily ponds in a Japanese garden, the next you’re staring down a Florentine loggia or ducking into a Spanish patio that smells like citrus and generational wealth.

It’s also here, amid the absurd beauty of Cap Ferrat’s turquoise inlets and impossible villas, that I see her again: Romy. Turns out she got married here in 1966. To Harry Meyen. Good for her.

The Riviera as State of Mind

Nice isn’t just a city—it’s a lifestyle proposal. A reminder that modern masculinity might include knowing your Warhol from your Wurstsalat, wearing linen without apology, and being able to hold your own in both a gallery and a farmers’ market.

It’s about slowing down, dressing up, and finding the poetry in a grilled panini with four cheeses. It’s art without the arrogance, elegance without the effort.

And when the sun sets over the Baie des Anges—painting the rooftops red, the sea lavender, and the mood somewhere between “wistful” and “ecstatic”—you realize that Nice doesn’t need to try.

It just is.