Author: Grubb

Arles is known among art lovers as the place in Provence where Van Gogh spent a prolific 15 months in the late 1880s finishing over 200 paintings.  During this time his work became brighter as his attention became more focused on his surroundings.  Just look at “The Yellow House,” “Bedroom in Arles,” or “The Night Café.”  Arles is…

The Cimiez Monastery in Nice tops a hill above the park by the Matisse museum that has paths named after American jazz legends.   The original monastery was founded in the 13th century and has been rebuilt many times over the years. It was run by Franciscans most of whom were friars.  So instead of being cloistered…

Today’s trip along the coast took us to Menton on the border of Italy.  We wanted to get away from busy promenades and we succeeded.  Menton has all the attributes of a French Riviera town minus the crowd attractions of a famous casino, cathedral, or film festival. It does have the Jean Cocteau museum in a former…

When we took our #82 bus to the town of Eze high up in the hills on the coast overlooking the Mediterranean I thought today we’d be, well, at ease in Eze.  So the minute I stepped off the bus I plopped down at a nearby café and ordered cappuccino along with the rich pastry du…

And that’s all she got, my regards, since we roamed the Monte Carlo casino before it was open for gambling.  The Beaux Arts cathedral of high stakes betting was featured in Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, “Casino Royale.”  It wasn’t in the eponymous movie, but it turned up in another Bond film, “Never Say Never…

Sunday we left late morning to catch a bus to the Chagall museum.  On exhibit were large canvases of Old Testament scenes.  With Chagall there are usually spirits flying around his canvases, so with my graveyard visitations from Paris still fresh in my mind I think I was more open to his angel-inflected Biblical paintings.   Then there…

Saturday morning on our way to catch the bullet train to Antibes we passed people bundled up in jackets and parkas.  The temperature was in the mid-sixties.  Come on folks, toughen up!  Unless…unless the news, which we’ve been blithely ignoring, had reported another variation on weather weirdness with a cold front moving in.  Frost hits the French Riviera! When…

I caught a slight bug on our last day in Paris, but if there’s any place to recover from a cold I can’t think of any better than Nice.  Nothing like a little salubrious sea air along with a night’s sleep not suffering from jet lag.   This morning we took a bus into the hills and…

When we travel we rarely have the time, or the inclination, to read, or watch, the news.  We map our daily destination, choose our mode of transport, luck on a good café for coffee, and then explore museums, historical sites, markets, parks, neighborhoods, interesting monuments, fascinating architecture, and then, after sampling the local fare, if we…

Georges Méliès’ grave is one I should have visited when we were at the Pere Lachaise cemetery.  I’ve always thought that the imaginative silent films he made at the turn-of-the-century were extraordinary.  When most of the other filmmakers at that time were shooting rudimentary slices-of-life, Méliès was already experimenting with special effects.  Based on a Jules Verne story,…