Antibes

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 we got off the train to wend our way through the old town portion of Antibes, the temperature was already in the seventies, so my fear of sudden climate change was reduced.  

The Picasso museum was off a street where a local market was jammed with people cruising the produce.

The museum’s second floor had a Juan Miró exhibit which was quite good.  Apparently he hung out with Picasso in Antibes after the second world war.

The Picasso collection was on the top floor.  Almost any art museum in the world with have a sample of his work, and I saw the huge Picasso retrospective in New York in the early 80s, but I have to admit that isolating his Antibes production was a good idea.  You don’t get overwhelmed and there are some fine paintings.  

The hallways connecting the rooms are plastered with photos of Picasso at work and with friends.  In all of the shots he is wearing shorts.  A septuagenarian in shorts, even if he is a genius, isn’t the most prepossessing figure, but I guess the museum felt they needed to distinguish the Antibes Picasso from the Paris Picasso.

Oddly, on the Picasso floor, were a couple of Michelangelo statues that I missed among the mob in the Louvre.  Sure, okay, they were copies, but at least I got to look at them without elbowing my way up close.  

The museum had a pleasant veranda overlooking the sea.

We had a cappuccino/cannoli break we walked the promenade past a private beach and a public beach.  The public beach was scattered pyre-shaped collections of driftwood.  

I doubt whether lighting these tepee creations on fire was an option, but the sight of them tickled a primitive urge.

What next?  Well, I had to have us check out Fort Carré.  Built by Henry II in the 16th century on a high promontory overlooking Antibes harbor it was meant to check the ambitions of less-than-neighborly Duke of Savoy.  In our time it starred  as the bad guy’s fortress in the Bond film, “Never Say Never Again.”  

It looked impressive on a map with four arrow-head shaped bastions spiking the corners of the fort.  In person, after an hour’s trek through the twisty streets of Antibes, its wow factor was seriously diminished.  High stone walls thick enough to withstand a cannonball were its major feature.  

The empty stone casements once meant for cannon barrels now offer tourists viewing stations for peering out at the sea.  

Maybe someday a billionaire will make a deal to use all that stone for the base of an exclusive hotel.  Until the then, Fort Carré sits abandoned until the next movie crew shows up.