Nice

• 1. Introduction

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  Nice carries a nickname that doubles as a song. Nice la Belle, "Nice the Beautiful," was written by Menica Rondelly and still stands as the city's unofficial anthem. That affection took root long before anyone set it to music. At Terra Amata, a site within the Nice agglomeration, archaeologists found evidence that people were lighting fires there 380,000 years ago.

  Centuries later, this stretch of Mediterranean coast changed hands again and again, and its ownership became a matter of war, treaties and disputed votes. English lords wintered here before Russian nobility followed, and painters and writers kept arriving long after the aristocrats moved on.

  What was it about this patch of coastline that so many empires refused to let go of? And what did all those visitors, from exiled royals to restless artists, find here that made them stay?

• 2. Roots in Deep Time

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  Hominid settlements appeared in the Nice area as long as 400,000 years ago, during the age of Homo erectus. At the Terra Amata site, archaeologists also uncovered flint tools dated to around 230,000 years ago, alongside early evidence of house construction. Around 350 BC, colonists from the Greek city of Phocaea, in western Anatolia, are thought to have founded a permanent settlement. They named it Nikaia to honor a victory over the neighboring Ligurians, likely the Vediantii kingdom, and Nike was the Greek goddess of victory.

  Cemenelum, a separate Roman town, soon became Nice's fiercest rival. The port itself grew into one of the Ligurian coast's busiest trading harbors. Cemenelum survived as an independent city until the Lombard invasions, and its ruins now sit in Cimiez, a district of Nice. In the 7th century, Nice joined the Genoese League, an alliance of towns in Liguria. The city repulsed a Saracen attack in 729, but raiders pillaged and burned it in 859 and again in 880.

  Through the 13th and 14th centuries, the Counts of Provence repeatedly seized Nice, only to see it regain independence while staying allied with Genoa. The Old Town sat inside medieval walls, with the River Paillon shielding the landward side and fortifications on Castle Hill covering the east. Excavations beneath Place de Garibaldi later uncovered the remains of a well-defended gate on the road from Turin.

  In 1388, the citizens made a choice that would shape the next five centuries. They placed the commune under the protection of the Counts of Savoy.

• 3. A Prize Fought Over

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  Once under Savoy's protection, Nice's maritime strength grew quickly enough to fend off Barbary pirates, and its fortifications and roads expanded to match. In 1561, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, replaced Latin with Italian as the official language of government in Nice. War between Francis I and Charles V brought pestilence and famine to the city for several years, until Pope Paul III helped broker a ten-year truce at nearby Villeneuve-Loubet in 1538.

  In 1543, the combined Franco-Ottoman forces of Francis I and Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha besieged Nice. The inhabitants repulsed the initial assault, but a punishing bombardment eventually forced them to surrender, letting Barbarossa seize 2,500 captives as plunder. Nicolas Catinat captured the city again in 1691, and after Nice returned to Savoy in 1696, the French besieged it once more in 1705 and demolished its citadel and ramparts the following year.

  The Treaty of Utrecht returned Nice to the Duke of Savoy in 1713, the same year he was recognized as King of Sicily. French and Spanish forces occupied it again from 1744 until the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The armies of the First French Republic conquered the County of Nice in 1792, and it stayed part of France until 1814, when it reverted to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.

  After the Treaty of Turin in 1860, Sardinia's king ceded the county to Napoleon III's France as a reward for French help against Austria. On the 1st of April 1860, King Victor-Emmanuel II called on Nice's residents to accept the shift in sovereignty. A plebiscite followed on the 15th and the 16th of April, with the "yes" side winning 83 percent of registered voters across the county and 86 percent in Nice itself, though many opponents abstained. In Levens, officials recorded 481 ballots from only 407 registered voters, nearly all supporting the merger with France.

  Officials went as far as francizing surnames, turning the Italian name Bianchi into Leblanc and Del Ponte into Dupont. Italian, once the county's official language in church, schools and theaters, was replaced by French immediately after annexation. About a quarter of Nice's population, roughly 11,000 people, chose to leave for Italy in the Niçard exodus. Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was born in Nice, opposed the cession and argued the vote had been rigged.

  In the 1871 elections, pro-Italian candidates took 26,534 of 29,428 votes cast, and Garibaldi won a seat in the National Assembly. Crowds filled the streets shouting "Viva Nizza! Viva Garibaldi!", prompting the French government to send 10,000 soldiers, shut down the paper Il Diritto di Nizza and jail several protesters. Three days of unrest, from the 8th to the 10th of February 1871, became known as the Niçard Vespers, and French troops crushed it. On the 13th of February 1871, Garibaldi was barred from addressing parliament in Bordeaux and resigned his seat.

  Italian-language newspapers kept closing for decades after, with Il Pensiero di Nizza shut down in 1895 on charges of irredentism, even as a very different set of visitors was arriving to spend their winters on the coast.

• 4. Winter Capital of European Aristocracy

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  By the second half of the 18th century, wealthy English families were choosing to spend their winters on this mild Mediterranean coast rather than at home. Reverend Lewis Way led and financed the early English colony's plan to build a coastal promenade. Niçois residents first called it the Camin dei Anglès, the English Way, in their native Nissart dialect, and the French renamed it La Promenade des Anglais in 1823.

  Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, inaugurated the refurbished promenade in 1931. Its name honored visitors such as Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII, who both spent winters in Nice. Henri Negresco built the palatial hotel that bears his name on the Promenade in 1912, and when it opened the following year, its entrance faced away from the Mediterranean.

  Nice's Russian Orthodox Cemetery counted Prince Nicholas Alexandrovich, heir to the Russian imperial throne, among its patrons before he died in the city. Buried there too is Princess Catherine Dolgorukova, who had been the morganatic wife of Tsar Alexander II, along with two leaders of the anti-Communist White Movement, General Dmitry Shcherbachev and General Nikolai Yudenich.

  Not every notable name that came to rest in Nice arrived from Russia or England. Jewelers, engineers and comic-strip creators would eventually fill another cemetery across town.

• 5. Artists and Writers

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  At the Cimetière du Château, the jeweler Alfred Van Cleef lies buried alongside Emil Jellinek-Mercedes, who founded the Mercedes car company. The same cemetery holds poet Agathe-Sophie Sasserno, Asterix creator Rene Goscinny, Phantom of the Opera author Gaston Leroux, French prime minister Léon Gambetta, and José Gustavo Guerrero, the first president of the International Court of Justice.

  Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Niki de Saint Phalle and Arman all found something in Nice's light worth painting, and their work now fills the city's museums, among them the Musée Marc Chagall, the Musée Matisse and the Musée des Beaux-Arts.

  In Nice, Frank Harris produced several books, among them his autobiography, My Life and Loves. Nietzsche returned to the city for six winters in a row, drafting Thus Spoke Zarathustra during his stays. Chekhov, too, worked on a play here, finishing Three Sisters while he lived in Nice.

  None of these visitors witnessed what the 20th century would bring to the streets they walked, when war turned the same coastline into a refuge and then a battleground.

• 6. War, Refuge and Resistance

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  September 1939 brought war, and with it a wave of displaced foreigners seeking safety in Nice, including Jews fleeing the Nazi advance through Eastern Europe. From there, many pressed on toward French colonies, Morocco, or North and South America in search of further shelter. After the Vichy Regime took power in July 1940, rising antisemitic persecution pushed the exodus forward, especially from July 1941 through 1942.

  The Laval government detained 655 foreign-born Jews on the 26th of August 1942, holding them at the Auvare barracks before deporting 560 of them to the Drancy internment camp on the 31st of August. Jewish banker Angelo Donati and Capuchin friar Père Marie-Benoît pushed back, and their efforts led local authorities to slow enforcement of the Vichy anti-Jewish laws.

  Nice's earliest resistance came from a handful of graduating students at the Lycée de Nice, who organized against the new regime in September 1940; the Gestapo caught up with them in 1944, and they were executed near Castellane. Several hundred protesters marched along Avenue de la Victoire and through Place Masséna on the 14th of July 1942, in the first public demonstrations against the occupation. That November, German forces took over most of unoccupied France, leaving only a smaller zone, including Nice, under Italian control.

  The resistance regained momentum only after Italy's surrender in 1943, when German forces took over the former Italian zone. Between December 1943 and July 1944, the local Gestapo tortured and executed a wave of partisans as reprisals grew harsher. Liberation came on the 30th of August 1944, when American paratroopers entered Nice. By war's end, the population had fallen by 15 percent, and the local economy lay in ruins.

  Recovery, when it came, would be led by one family that held the mayor's office for most of the next four decades.

• 7. Boom, Scandal and Attack

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  Jean Médecin ran city hall for 33 years across two stints, 1928 to 1943 and 1947 to 1965. His son Jacques then took over for 24 more years, from 1966 to 1990, building a convention centre, theatres and new expressways as tourism and construction boomed. Algerian independence in 1962 brought Pieds-Noirs refugees to Nice, shifting the makeup of its population.

  Rumors of corruption in city hall surfaced by the late 1980s, and formal accusations eventually drove Jacques Médecin out of France in 1990. Uruguay arrested him in 1993; France extradited him back in 1994 and convicted him on multiple corruption counts.

  A landslide combined with an undersea slide off Nice on the 16th of October 1979, generating two tsunamis that hit the city's western shoreline and killed between 8 and 23 people.

  European leaders gathered in Nice in February 2001 to negotiate the Treaty of Nice, which amended the institutions of the European Union. In 2003, local Chief Prosecutor Éric de Montgolfier alleged that Masonic ties had derailed judicial cases involving local figures, though a later report found his accusations unwarranted.

  On the 14th of July 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a truck into a crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks on the Promenade des Anglais. The attack killed 87 people, including the perpetrator, whom police shot dead, and left 434 more injured, 52 of them in critical condition.

  A stabbing attack at Notre-Dame de Nice killed three people on the 29th of October 2020, including a woman whom the attacker beheaded before police shot and arrested him. Both attacks were claimed by the Islamic State. In 2021, UNESCO named Nice a World Heritage Site under the title "Nice, Winter Resort Town of the Riviera." Seven people from a single family, three young children, three adults and a teenager, died in an arson attack on the 18th of July 2024, while smoke inhalation left roughly thirty others affected and one further victim in critical condition.

  Through all of it, the city held onto older rhythms too: a cannon fired at noon since 1860, a tradition begun by Sir Thomas Coventry simply to make sure citizens had lunch on time.

• 8. Language and Local Flavor

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  Nice speaks with its own tongue too: Niçard, or Nissart, an Occitan dialect that a meaningful minority of residents still use daily, though some Italian scholars classify it instead as Ligurian. Heavy borrowing from Italian, and some from Corsican, leaves Niçard easier for Italian speakers to follow than most other Provençal dialects. The farandole, an open-chain community dance, is one folk tradition that has survived alongside the language.

  Nice cooks like its neighbors: the local table borrows heavily from Provence, Liguria and Piedmont, and leans on olive oil, anchovies, fruit and vegetables. Ships that once arrived to collect olive oil came loaded with goods from Northern Europe, including dried haddock, folding that into the local repertoire too. That repertoire now runs to around 200 recipes. Among the best known is pissaladière, an onion-and-anchovy tart derived from the Ligurian pissalandrea, alongside socca, a chickpea-flour pancake.

  Salade niçoise combines tomatoes, baked eggs, tuna or anchovies and olives, without the potatoes or green beans sometimes added elsewhere. Farcis niçois stuffs vegetables with breadcrumbs, meat and herbs. Local fishermen, now fewer than ten in number, still bring in mullets, bream, sea urchins and anchovies, giving rise to a local saying: fish are born in the sea and die in oil.

  That saying has outlasted every regime that ever claimed this coastline, still repeated today over plates of anchovies pulled from the same waters Greek traders once sailed.