Menton

Why go

Menton is the Riviera at its gentlest: sheltered by mountains, it has a famously mild winter, and its old town of tall pastel houses climbs straight up from the sea to a Baroque church and a cemetery with one of the best views on the coast. It feels half Italian, which it nearly was, and it is calmer than Nice or Cannes. Come in winter, when Paris is grey, for lemon trees in fruit and lunch in the sun.

History

For five centuries Menton belonged to Monaco. The Grimaldi family acquired it in 1346, and the princes ruled it, with interruptions, until the French Revolution and again after 1815. The town lived from olive oil and, above all, from citrus: lemons grew so well on its terraces that they were exported in large quantities.

That trade helped end Monegasque rule. In 1848, angered among other things by a tax on lemon exports, Menton and neighbouring Roquebrune rebelled and declared themselves free cities under the protection of Sardinia. After the Treaty of Turin of 1860 and a plebiscite, they voted to join France, and in February 1861 the prince of Monaco gave up his rights in exchange for four million francs paid by Napoleon III.

French Menton became a winter resort almost at once. In 1861 the English physician James Henry Bennet published a book praising its climate for invalids, especially those with tuberculosis, and British and Russian visitors filled hotels and villas. They also planted gardens, using the mild climate to grow tropical and subtropical plants. The New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote here for a time around 1920, at the Villa Isola Bella.

In 1934 the hoteliers, looking for an event to fill the winter season, launched a lemon festival that grew into the Fête du Citron, held every February. In the 1950s Jean Cocteau fell for the town: he decorated the wedding hall of the town hall and turned a seventeenth-century harbour fort, the Bastion, into a museum of his work. A larger Cocteau museum opened by the sea in 2011.