A Stroll on the Riviera

“Pa-papa-para-paara-ra… When your – spine is cracking and your – hands, they shake…”

 The riff of Ventilator Blues came out of the speakers just as I was leaving the Villefranche exit behind me. I’d fished out the right cassette from the drawer. Continuing along towards Cannes, I tried to imagine the atmosphere of those times when the Stones had composed and recorded ‘Exile on Main Street’, just there, in Keith Richards’ villa.
At the time that part of the Cote d’Azur hadn’t yet become the ideal place to invest in a studio flat with bath and kitchen area in one of those mega-blocks advertised by the agencies in northern Italian papers.
But gradually towards the end of the eighties we saw Menton become an Italian outpost in France and a wave of colonists cross the border at Ventimiglia to populate beaches, shopping centres, restaurants and discos from Cap d’Ail to the gulf of La Napoule. It was mainly Italians starved of baguettes, pâté and goat cheese who contributed to the property boom of the last fifteen years.
Coming off the motorway at Antibes I was wondering what would happen in the next fifteen. I had just finished reading Super-Cannes, J.G. Ballard’s latest novel, and I was asking myself if Sophia Antipolis was really destined to become just the first of a series of high development areas which were soon to transform Provence into Europe’s Silicon Valley.

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