July 13 - Pride of the Cote D'Azur

Again we have slept past 10:00!  Today we decide to rent bicycles & we head over to one of the Velo Bleu stations that dot the city.  It turns out to be a pretty complicated system requiring several phone calls & ultimately we have to have a local help us.   But once we get everything registered we are good to go.  Originally we thought we might ride to the Musée Matisse but I just want to follow the coast & see where it takes us.  Nathalie recommended we visit the Villa Ephrussi de Rothchild in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, about 10 kilometers away.  That seems pretty close so we start pedaling until we are on the Princess Grace Highway.  It is pretty warm today & we stop often to cool off & take photos.  Soon we arrive at the Villa, purchase tickets & enter into another world.

 The villa was designed by the French architect Aaron Messiah, and constructed between 1905 and 1912 by Baroness Beatrice de Rothschild (1864-1934). A member of the Rothschild banking family and the  wife of the banker Baron Maurice de Ephrussi, Beatrice de Rothschild built her rose-colored villa on a promontory on the isthmus of Cap Ferrat overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.  The Baroness filled the mansion with antique furniture, Old Master paintings, sculptures, objets d’art, and assembled an extensive collection of rare porcelain.  The gardens are classified by the French Ministry of Culture as one of the Notable Gardens of France.

The Villa is surrounded by nine gardens, each on a different theme: Florentine, Spanish, Garden a la française, exotic, a stone garden, a Japanese garden, a rose garden, Provençal and a garden de Sèvres.  The garden was conceived in the form of a ship, to be viewed from the loggia of the house, which was like the bridge of a vessel, with the sea visible on all sides.  It was inspired by a voyage she made on the liner Île de France, and the villa was given that name.  The thirty gardeners who maintained it were dressed as sailors with berets with red pom poms.

We spend a good hour & a half touring both the villa and the extensive grounds.  This is a delightful surprise.  Although we plan to tour the ultimate chateau, Versailles, next week, I have a feeling I will prefer this one for its intimacy and the lack of crowds I’m sure we will encounter there.  We stop for a cold drink in the Tea Garden before heading back to Nice.

Just as we enter town and get on our street I see and hear something  familiar.  Rainbow balloons, pumping disco music, floats, drag queens.  This can only mean one thing.  We have stumbled on to the Nice Pride Parade.  We inch our bicycles into the fray & march with the revelers all the way home.  What a fantastic day of surprises!