The pastel-coloured old town of Menton stacked on a hillside above the harbour near the Italian border
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Menton

"Twenty minutes from Nice, and the accents, the food, and the light had all quietly become Italian."

The last French town before Italy, warm enough to grow lemons year-round, with a pastel old town that leans as much toward Liguria as it does toward the rest of the Riviera.

Pierre Words & photographs

Menton sits close enough to Italy that the border town of Ventimiglia is a twenty-minute train ride, and the town feels caught pleasantly between the two countries — pastel Ligurian-style façades stacked on the hill, menus that slip between French and Italian depending on the owner’s grandmother, and a microclimate, sheltered by mountains on three sides, warm enough that lemon trees fruit here nearly year-round in a way they don’t anywhere else on the French coast.

A town built around a fruit

Menton’s relationship with the lemon borders on civic religion. Every February the town holds the Fête du Citron, building enormous sculptures entirely out of citrus fruit in the Jardins Biovès, and even outside festival season the smell of lemon groves drifts down from the terraced hillsides above town. We visited a small lemon grove open to visitors, wandered under trees heavy with fruit in every stage from green to waxy yellow, and left with a bag of lemons so fragrant the whole rental car smelled like a patisserie for the rest of the trip.

Rows of lemon trees heavy with yellow fruit on a terraced hillside grove above Menton

Jean Cocteau’s harbour-front museum

Down at the old port, a small bastion that Cocteau helped design as a museum in the 1960s holds a compact, striking collection of his work, and a newer building nearby houses the larger Cocteau collection donated late in his life. We spent an hour there and came out to the harbour just as the fishing boats were coming in, the pastel buildings of the old town stacked up the hill behind us in a way that, again, looked more like a postcard from Liguria than one from France.

The small bastion museum dedicated to Jean Cocteau at the old harbour in Menton

When to go: February for the Fête du Citron if you can stand the crowds it draws for such a small town; otherwise the shoulder months either side of summer give you the mildest version of a town that’s mild almost year-round anyway.