Times have changed. For those with the means, Nice was surely truly delightful in its pre-World War I heyday, when royalty from Russia, England and Germany enjoyed a leisurely winter season in the Riviera city.

The Roaring Twenties

Cycling along the Promenade des Anglais

In the early 1920s, Nice changed dramatically and the city was reshaped. Reshaped to accommodate the automobile, and reshaped to accommodate a totally new kind of visitor: Americans. Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald wanted to drive, not walk, along Promenade des Anglais.

The new Riviera was brasher and louder than its pre-war counterpart. And the thousands of flappers and playboys who cruised over the Atlantic to enjoy an American summer season on the Côte d’Azur created a new kind of Riviera. They drank cocktails (free from Prohibition restraints), explored the Mediterranean coast and revelled in summer rather than winter sun. It was visitors from the US who persuaded Nice hoteliers that they should not bar and shutter their premises from Easter to early October.

The Americans did not stay long. Their love affair with the Riviera was abruptly curtailed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. But the Roaring Twenties left their mark, creating a Riviera style that still greatly inflects how we perceive the region today.

Nice today

The Promenade des Anglais is not the gentle walk it was a hundred years ago. Six lanes of traffic speed along Promenade des Anglais, unhappily separating the city from its beach. Critics of the Riviera city argue that the beach was overrated anyway. There is not a speck of sand in sight on this long stony sweep of coast.

Yet Nice still has something going for it, and it’s a great city to explore for a day or two. In the Musée Matisse and the Musée Chagall, both north of the city center, Nice has two world-class art galleries. Its Orthodox cathedral is a very fine example of Russian sacred architecture and contains a treasure trove of Russian religious art.

The old part of town (called Vieux Nice) is a great place just to wander, especially on weekday mornings (not Mondays) when the streets and squares around Cours Saleya host a lively open market. Then climb up to Le Château (which curiously has no château) for fine views of Vieux Nice and the port below.

Where to stay

Nice remains a popular spot for Russian visitors and the city has a good range of restaurants and shops that cater to this Russian clientele. And for somewhere to stay, why not try the hotel favored by both Lenin and Chekhov? They both stayed at the Pension Russe.

Okay, the name has changed and nowadays the old Russian guesthouse styles itself Hotel L’Oasis. The hotel reopened last year after renovation. It is in a lovely leafy courtyard, a calm green retreat off Rue Gounod that offers the perfect antidote to the noise and bustle of Promenade des Anglais. Double or twin rooms run from €65 low season to €79 high season (including breakfast).

How to get there

Nice is easy to reach. It has direct trains from seven European capital cities, among them half a dozen daily trains from Paris. The journey time from Paris is less than six hours.

The local Nice Côte d’Azur Airport receives direct flights from over 100 cities in Europe and further afield. Travelers from North America can fly into Nice on direct daily flights from New York (JFK) with Delta and twice weekly flights from Montréal with Air Transat.

Nice has one of those small and manageable airports that make a great gateway into Europe. But rather than just changing planes, why not stop off for a day or two to explore the French Riviera’s major metropolitan center?

The post Nice, France: Give Nice a chance! appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Europe’s car train network

Car trains don’t usually feature in the regular train schedules, and are often not so easy to find out about. Europe’s largest operator is DB Autozug, a division of Deutsche Bahn, which this year celebrates 80 years of operations. Apart from a network of routes within Germany, DB Autozug operates services from seven bases in Germany to ten destinations in France, Austria and Italy.

Other car train operators to bear in mind are:

• ÖBB (Austrian Railways): Six routes within Austria plus international services to Germany and ItalyAustria plus international services to Germany and Italy
• Trenitalia: Six routes within Italy
• SNCF Auto-Train: Some two dozen routes within France including some very useful cross-country links, such as from France’s Atlantic coast to the Riviera or Brittany to Alsace
• Optima Tours run the Optima Express which makes a big leap across the Balkans from Austria to Turkey.

In addition, there are useful domestic services in Croatia and Finland, plus of course a large number of short-hop car trains that transport vehicles and their passengers through Alpine tunnels, under the English Channel or to offshore islands linked by rail causeways to the mainland (as in the case of the German holiday island of Sylt).

Car train fares

Car train services can be pricey, but at the top end they offer a very high level of comfort with overnight journeys in modern sleeping cars, along with a good on-board restaurant where you can enjoy dinner before retiring for the night. It is possible to board a train in northern Germany mid-afternoon and wake up next morning on the shores of the Mediterranean, having traveled a thousand miles but without having spent a cent on fuel.

Some operators offer discount options for travelers prepared to book very early or last minute. Early bookers with ÖBB, for example, can pick up a one way ticket for car and driver from Vienna to Hamburg from just €133, a journey which by road would take about 11 hours and cost (depending on vehicle size) upwards of €80 in fuel.

National and international services: DB Autozug

DB Autozug has a great one-way special for inner-German route, offering fares of €99, which covers car transport and couchette accommodation for the driver. For international journeys, there is a €149 fare (similarly for vehicle plus driver with couchette).

Regular fares for international journeys for those not wanting to book well in advance start at €179 for car with driver or €319 including car transport plus couchettes for up to five passengers. Not cheap, we know, but really an amazing way to start or end a European car tour. And, once your car rental company has told you that their one-way drop charge from Germany to the Med is over €400, the idea of using a car train to return to your point of origin begins to look like a decidedly attractive proposition.

Car train services are also a credible option for British travelers looking for southern sunshine who want to avoid the long grind south on continental motorways.  The DB Autozug terminal at Düsseldorf is less than a three-hour drive from Channel ports.

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Hints of Italy

Menton hints of Italy even before you cross the border, with its bilingual street names and Italian-style architecture. Curiously, the town only became French in 1860, having historically been part of Monaco until in 1848 it seceded from the Principality in a spat over taxes on lemon exports. Menton then enjoyed a brief fling as an independent republic before throwing in its lot with the Kingdom of Sardinia and eventually joining France.

Mentonasques are quick to remind visitors even today that Menton is in France merely by choice, and the town’s window shutters in that distinctive Ligurian green are a reminder that this most Italianate of French Riviera towns still has a part of its heart in Italy.

Menton’s health resort history

Climb up to the cemetery high above the Old Town and you will quickly discover how Menton established its credentials in Riviera tourism. A hundred years ago, Menton was one of Europe’s premier health resorts, with thousands of northern Europeans taking their bronchial bacilli to sunny Menton to try and rid their lungs of tuberculosis. The crowded cemetery, full of those who died of consumption, attests to the fact that a few months of indolence in Menton did not always guarantee recuperation. Russians, Germans, English and Irish share the same burial ground, all victims of a disease that indiscriminately struck down poets and philosophers, counts and colonels.

The pulmonary pilgrims of yesterday have been replaced by a new generation of traveler, often anxious to find the quieter side of the Riviera. Menton is always a great stopover on routes from Provence to Genoa —made easy by the frequency of trains along this stretch of coast. Both westbound towards Nice and eastbound into Italy, trains generally run twice hourly.

Exploring the town

But with direct daily TGV services from Paris (and a useful direct overnight train, too), Menton is a place worth visiting in its own right. Our best Menton days have involved nothing more demanding than wandering around the produce stalls in the Moorish market on the waterfront and then drifting from café to café.

Our favorite local curiosity is the “salle de mariage” (wedding hall) in Menton’s City Hall, which is a striking piece of interior design by French artist and film director Jean Cocteau. Further afield, the attractive mountain town of Sospel is reached by direct bus from Menton. And the stunning Giardini Botanici Hanbury (Hanbury Gardens), just over the border in Italy, which we featured last year on EuroCheapo, are only four miles east of the city.

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Great European gardens

Our favorite European gardens certainly include Mount Stewart and Glenveagh in Ireland (free entry at Glenveagh), Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium and the Tresco Abbey Gardens in the Isles of Scilly.

But our favorite gem, one of the very best gardens that Europe has to offer, lies on the Riviera coast of Liguria (just inside Italy and merely a stone’s throw from the French border).

The Hanbury Gardens at Cape Mortola (Liguria)

The Hanbury Gardens at La Mortola are a Riviera highlight, but one too often missed in favor of the glitz and the gloss of the famous capes across the French border. Thomas Hanbury was a Quaker entrepreneur who arrived on the Riviera coast in 1867. He could have had his pick of any of the great capes, but he chose Capo Mortola for his grand botanical experiment, amassing taxa from across the world and acclimatising them on the wild headland that juts out into the Mediterranean.

Palazzo Orengo in Italy’s Hanbury Gardens, photo by hiddeneurope

This is not a place for studied formality, but a rambling maze of paths and stairways, rocky alcoves and wooded glades offset by stunning views of a Palladian villa (the Palazzo Orengo) and the azure Mediterranean beyond. Guidebooks will tell you to allow a good three to four hours to explore the gardens, but that is nowhere near enough to really appreciate all that the Giardini Botanici Hanbury have to offer.  We recommend arriving in the morning (gates open to the public at 9:30 AM) and stay until dusk (6 PM or even later during the extended summer opening which runs till mid-September). Admission is €7.50.

The Roman road at the Hanbury Gardens

The gardens incorporate a fabulous sunken Roman road, complete with a plaque recording the names of those who walked the route, a roll call that includes emperors, popes and kings – from Niccolo Machiavelli to Napoleon Bonaparte. For these travelers, on the Via Julia Augusta, Capo Mortola was merely a staging post along the road. For Thomas Hanbury, the taming of this stretch of the Mediterranean was his life’s great work. It deserves a whole day, as it is one of the truly fine unspoiled landscapes of the Ligurian coast.

The post Go Green: Hanbury Gardens and Europe’s other garden gems appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.