Antibes
"You can see Corsica from these ramparts on a clear day, apparently. We never got the clear day, and I still loved it."
A fortified port town where Vauban's ramparts hold back the sea, Picasso once painted in a seafront castle, and the covered market still runs the way it must have before any of that mattered.
Antibes sits on a small peninsula bristling with megayachts on one side and, on the other, walls that Vauban reinforced in the seventeenth century to keep out exactly the kind of trouble the town no longer has to worry about. We arrived by train from Nice, a twenty-minute ride that felt like changing decades, and spent the walk from the station to the old town slowly downgrading our idea of how crowded the Riviera was going to be.
Ramparts, and the sea that wants them back
The old town is still ringed by its fortifications, and a walk along the seafront ramparts — past the Bastion Saint-Jaume, past fishermen’s boats pulled up against the stone — gives you the port working almost exactly as it has for centuries, minus the actual fighting. On a clear day you’re told you can see Corsica from the walls near the lighthouse; the haze didn’t cooperate for us, but the view of the Baie des Anges curving toward the snow-capped Alps in the distance was more than enough compensation.
A castle full of Picasso and a market full of everything else
Picasso worked out of the Château Grimaldi for a few months in 1946, using an old sailmaker’s loft as a studio, and the building — now the Musée Picasso — holds an unexpectedly large collection from that short, prolific stay: ceramics, fauns, centaurs, a Mediterranean joy that’s obvious even to someone like me who usually finds Picasso more admirable than lovable. Downstairs from the museum’s hill, the Marché Provençal runs under a nineteenth-century iron roof, stalls of tapenade, socca, and cut flowers, and we bought lunch there — a jar of black olive tapenade and a warm loaf — that we ate on the ramparts an hour later.
When to go: Come midweek outside July-August, when the megayachts still fill the harbour but the old town’s lanes are walkable without shuffling behind a tour group. The market runs daily except Monday, so plan around that if it’s the point of your visit.