Menton is the last French town before Italy, and it knows it — the houses warm to ochre and rose, the cooking edges toward Liguria, and the air is a degree or two milder than anywhere else on the coast. That softness is the town’s whole fortune: it is warm enough to grow lemons in the open ground, which no other corner of France can quite manage.
I. The old town and the sea
The old town climbs in tiers to the Basilique Saint-Michel-Archange, a baroque church whose parvis of black-and-white pebbles looks straight out to sea. Below, the long pebble beach and the covered market hall keep the town in oranges, anchovies and olive oil; above, the old cemetery holds a view that is almost indecent for the dead.
“The one town in France warm enough to grow its own lemons in the open.”
II. A town of gardens
The mild air made Menton a town of gardens, planted by the wintering English and Russians and still kept. The Serre de la Madone, laid out by Lawrence Johnston of Hidcote, terraces rare plants up a sheltered valley; Val Rahmeh is a botanical garden of the tropics; the Jardin de la Fontana Rosa was the writer Blasco Ibáñez’s tiled dream of Spain. Each is a small world, and the season for them is long.
III. Cocteau, and the lemons
Menton kept Jean Cocteau, who decorated the seafront Bastion and the town hall’s wedding room; his work is the thread through the centre. And every February the Fête du Citron fills the gardens with giant figures built entirely from lemons and oranges — a carnival peculiar to this one warm town, and the surest sign of what grows here.
