Saint-Paul-de-Vence sits inside its sixteenth-century ramparts on a ridge in the hills behind Nice, a single oval of honey-stone houses you can walk around in twenty minutes and stay inside all day. For a century it was the village of painters — and it has never quite let the trade go.
I. Inside the ramparts
One gate at each end, one main lane, and a tangle of stepped alleys between — Saint-Paul is made for walking and nothing else. The walls were raised under François I; from the bastions the view runs down terraced hills to the sea. The galleries are thick now, perhaps too thick, but climb early and the stone, the fountains and the worn cobbles are still the village the painters knew.
“They paid for their dinners in paintings, and the walls have never been worth more.”
II. La Colombe d’Or and the painters
Just outside the gate, La Colombe d’Or began as a simple inn and became legend: through the lean years Matisse, Picasso, Braque and others settled their bills with work, and the dining room and garden still hang with what they left. You need a table to see it — but the village itself wears the same history more lightly, in studios and small galleries along every lane.
III. The Fondation Maeght
In the pines above the walls stands the Fondation Maeght, one of Europe’s finest private modern-art museums — a building made with the artists themselves, a Giacometti courtyard, a Miró labyrinth, mosaics by Chagall and Braque. Chagall, who lived here for years, lies in the village cemetery; the whole hillside is, in the end, one long argument for the twentieth century.
