The coloured lanes
Ochre, Italian red and washing strung between windows.
Baptiste Rossi — Public domain · Myrabella — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Mike is Michi — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Smiley.toerist — CC BY-SA 4.0
Because it was. Nice was ruled by the **House of Savoy** (the Kingdom of Sardinia) for centuries and joined France only in **1860**, by a plebiscite held as part of a political bargain in which France backed Italian unification. So its architecture, colours, dialect and cooking are Italian at the root, and its family names end in -i and -o. That mixture — a French city with a Ligurian soul — is what sets Nice apart from the rest of the Riviera.
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Old Nice is the maze between the castle hill and the sea: a dense network of narrow lanes the sun barely reaches, with façades in ochre and Italian red and washing strung between the windows — closer in spirit to **Genoa or Turin** than to France, and that is no accident: Nice belonged to the Kingdom of **Savoy-Sardinia** until 1860, and became French only by a plebiscite that year. The trace is in everything: the Niçois dialect, the Italian family names, the cooking (socca and farcis), and the Italianate baroque churches — **Sainte-Réparate Cathedral** with its tiled dome, and the **Chapelle de la Miséricorde**, which many consider the finest baroque interior in the city. The quarter today is a mixture: markets, bakeries and socca sellers by day, and crowded restaurants and bars by night. Wander without a map — it is small and you will not be lost for long, and every lane opens onto a little square or a church.
Ochre, Italian red and washing strung between windows.
Sainte-Réparate and the Miséricorde — breathtaking interiors.
Wood ovens in the lanes turning out hot pancakes all day.
Vieux Nice, 06300 Nice