Thursday, June 18 we arrived in Nice. On the agenda for the morning was a bus trip to Saint Paul de Vence for a visit to both the picturesque hilltop town and the nearby Maeght Foundation and Museum.
The story of Saint Paul de Vence is that it was originally a medieval fortified town. It has narrow stone streets with shops and homes. This photo from the trip brochure captures it well. More recently several artists were attracted to the area because, since there were no job opportunities people left and the rents were cheap, and the artists liked the light. Sometimes they met at a local restaurant, Cafe de la Place. It's still there. Sometimes they were a little short of cash, and the owner accepted paintings as payment. At one point, she had accumulated quite a few paintings. She wondered if they were worth anything. So she invited some art critics to look at the paintings. They informed her that, yes the paintings by Miro, Chagall, Picasso, and others were indeed valuable.
At one stop our guide gave us a puzzle. This is a bougainvillea plant. What color are the flowers? (This is just the sort of thing that I appreciate.) ... White. This plant has very tiny white flowers. (Click to expand.) It also has green leaves and magenta colored leaves. We stopped in the town's cemetery, a Catholic cemetery. Marc Chagall is buried there. He was not Catholic, but lived in the community for 20 years, was very active in local affairs, was an honorary citizen of Saint Paul de Vence, and so was permitted to be buried there.
It was just a short bus trip to the Maeght Foundation and Museum, a modern art museum. Some of the artwork is inside a building. Most of it is in outdoor gardens. Our tour director took care of our tickets and we had a reserved time to enter. Then something new (to me) happened. The tour director asked
how many people wanted to take photographs. There was an additional fee (2 euros) for each person who was going to take pictures. This same thing happened at some of the other sites we visited. Artists represented included Calder, Chagall, Matisse, Miro, and Braque. One piece that grabbed my attention was this dog. The story is that one day artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was walking in the rain on the streets of Paris. When he got home he made this 'self portrait'. As we were leaving the Corinthian II for the last time, five days after our visit here, our passports were returned to us and we were handed a memory stick with photographs the tour directors had taken. For this picture, I've taken one of the tour director's photographs and used a graphics editor to remove the background.
On this day we returned to the ship for lunch. For the afternoon there were three choices: visit the Matisse Museum, tour the Chateau de Ballet followed by a wine tasting, or free time in Nice. For me it was back to Nice for a visit to the Matisse Museum. One curious thing. On the way I noticed that some of the posts with traffic lights had a small traffic light about half way up the post. I had to ask. What is going on here‽ (Notice the interrobang.) These small traffic lights were on the right side of the road and they were right turn on red signals.
The Matisse Museum is in a 17th century villa. The front of the building has real windows and shutters and elaborate tromp l'oeil stone moldings surrounding the windows. Here is a picture one of our tour directors took. Just like several of our visits, photographs were not permitted inside. At one point our guide said to us: "We are now going to walk down the stairs. If anyone wants to take the elevator, press the button for floor minus one."
Look. Here is a photo that the Cruise Director took just after we left the harbor. The pilot is climbing down a rope ladder preparing to jump to the pilot boat.
In the evening we had a Roman Town Planning lecture by Cecil Wooten, chair of the Classics Department at University of North Carolina. He stated that we should not be asking the question, Why did the Roman Empire collapse? But, Why did it last almost 500 years? Later we went to the bow on the top deck for our first stargazing. It turned out that we were too close to the summer solstice, when days are at their longest. It didn't get dark till the end of the lecture, mostly about the visible constellations. We were on our way to the island of Corsica.
