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Chapter 33 - Marching Through Monaco to Italy
"When there is no peace within the family, filial piety and devotion arise." Lao Tsu
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Chapter 33 - Marching Through Monaco to Italy
"When there is no peace within the family, filial piety and devotion arise." Lao Tsu
It's another week before I return to Beaulieu. I'd planned to MedTrek every day but have been thwarted by incessant rain. Precipitation, and dramatic thunderstorms, are not a rarity on the Riviera. But one of the delights about the climate in the south of France is the rapidity with which the weather changes. Many times, right before my eyes, somber gray skies have become brilliant blue within seconds. But not this week.
Today, barring mishap, will be historic. For the first, and perhaps only, time, I'll walk in three different countries—France, Monaco and Italy—within just a few hours. Beyond Beaulieu's seaside sidewalk and rocky beaches, steep cliffs rise to the perched Eze Village on my left and, in this area of expensive and exclusive real estate, I stumble upon an eclectic mix of ornate, luxurious villas next to dilapidated ruins. The most unkempt home is paradoxically called Shangri-La.
The Nietzsche Trail heads uphill from Eze-sur-Mer to Eze Village and I briefly consider making the vertical climb to have an existential café au lait on the terrace of the Hôtel Chèvre d'Or, where Elissa and I recently spent a romantic weekend. But I stick to my three-countries-in-one-day agenda, remain on the basse corniche and pass Le Petite Afrique snack bar before strolling onto the grounds of the Hôtel Cap Estel.
Recalling a lunch here twenty years ago reminds me that I've probably written more stories about this part of France than anywhere else in the world. Not just about Sophia Antipolis and numerous Cannes film festivals, but also dictators (Haiti's deposed Baby Doc was in exile in Vallauris and Mobutu Sese Seko had a villa on Roquebrune-Cap-Martin), royalty (my daughter Sonia was born on the day Princess Grace died and I covered Monaco for two decades for People) and prestigious events involving celebrities, yachts, music, tennis, casinos and, even, duty-free shopping.
Typically, the "sentier littoral" around Cap d'Ail is a namedropper's delight. Greta Garbo frequented one home while Winston Churchill was a guest at the Villa Capponcina, which was owned by Lord Beaverbrook after World War II. The Marriott Hotel, which is officially on French soil, sits near the Monaco border and beyond it I gawk at the deluxe seaside apartments near the heliport in Fontvieille. The five-minute helicopter ride from the Nice Airport is, if you don't want to walk, a sensible and speedy way to get here. The low-flying copter not only hugs the coastline but the pilot, if you ask nicely, may also fly over Monaco's exotic gardens, royal palace, cliff-side aquarium, yacht-filled harbor, serene Japanese garden, plush hotels, ritzy restaurants, classy casinos and ultra-modern spa.
Monaco was once a Greek settlement and later a Roman port. But not everyone is aware that Fontvieille, where I'm walking, didn't even exist a few decades ago. Completely built on reclaimed land, it literally rose from the sea during the 1970s and now consists of apartment complexes, light industrial companies, a church, a bustling port and a mall. There's even a 20,000-seat football field on the seventh level of the Stade Louis II Stadium, which also contains a 50-meter indoor swimming pool.
The territorial addition instantly increased the size of Monaco by twenty-five percent and reigning Prince Albert II has plans to further "urbanize" his country's 4,100-meter shoreline. But, no matter what he does, the "postage-stamp sized principality" will always be synonymous with adjectives like "diminutive" and "Lilliputian" because it's still smaller New York's Central Park. And the well-mannered, law-abiding Monegasques will probably always remain distinctly different in behavior from the pastis-drinking, truffle-hunting, boule-playing Frenchmen that surround them.
Beyond the Princess Grace Rose Garden, which contains more than 5,500 rose bushes of myriad species, is the Fontvieille port. From there I crane my neck to get a look at the cliff-top palace on the Alpine-like Le Rocher, or The Rock, a rough-cut diamond-shaped hill jutting eight hundred meters into the Mediterranean that overlooks the entire principality.
The Rock can't be climbed from the Fontvieille side and steep cliffs prevent a seaside stroll around it. So I casually and briefly visit a museum that features 105 superbly restored antique automobiles collected by Albert's father Prince Rainier, who ran Monaco for over fifty years until he died in 2005. I'm sure that some locals have put the 1903 De Dion Bouton and a gigantic 1928 Hispano Suiza Coupe Chauffeur on their shopping lists.
On the other side of The Rock is La Condamine where steep steps lead to the salmon-colored Palais du Prince that's been home to Albert's family, the Grimaldis, almost continuously since 1297. Encircled by a parapet, the palace's cobblestone courtyard is flanked by cannon bequeathed by Louis XIV. Monaco's flag is not flying above the palace today, an indication that the prince is not in the country. But just a few minutes after my arrival, at precisely five minutes to noon, bells chime to signal the changing of the guard—mostly handsome, mostly young men attired in light blue helmets, dark blue trousers and even darker blue coats with red trim.
After watching this symbolic daily exercise, I creep to the ramparts and look down on the central market in La Condamine and across the port to Monte-Carlo, where the imposing Monte-Carlo Casino epitomizes vestiges of La Belle poque. The view is not always this peaceful, especially during the annual Formula 1 race each spring when the principality resembles a noisy albeit upscale NASCAR race track.
Guy de Maupassant once said Monaco attracted "the scum of continents and society, mixed with princes or future kings, with women of the world, the bourgeoisie, money lenders and exhausted girls, a mixture unique on earth." But that's not how the rich city-state, which now relies on gambling to bring in only about five percent of government revenue, looks today. It's easily the cleanest spot on the Riviera, if not the entire Mediterranean, and the only exhausted girls I see at this time of day are those cleaning the expensive hotel rooms.
Money laundering aside, the folks here are so law abiding that when I first visited in the late 1970s I would regularly leave a 50-franc note, worth about $10, on my dashboard with the windows open and the keys in the ignition. Neither the bill nor the car were ever taken, which made for a good story, and the jewels women wear are still the real thing.
One reason Europe's second smallest independent country after the Vatican is so spic-and-span is because, although the royal family doesn't like the phraseology, Monaco is a benevolent dictatorship and a benign police state. There's one police officer for every seventy-one inhabitants to maintain law and order in a place that's only 482 acres in size and has a Disneyland-like mix of quaint cobblestone streets, lavish hotels and hideous high-rise apartment residences. Security is one of the reasons that Anthony Burgess, Helmut Newton, Karl Lagerfeld, Claudia Schiffer, and half of the world's Formula One racecar drivers have lived here. Another reason might be that there's no law in Monaco requiring anyone to wear seat belts.
After his father's death, Prince Albert II became the 32nd member of the family dynasty to run the country. I first met the son of American actress Grace Kelly, whose full name is Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi, in the early 1980s. The prince, who signed a letter to me "Albert de Monaco" and whose secretary refers to him as "His Highness," said a few things in our initial interviews that have stuck with me.
The first was that he claimed "it often happens, particularly in the U.S., that someone will refer to me as Mr. Prince." That's funny. The second was "I'm straight and always have been." That was quite candid, especially in view of the then-constant rumors that Albert, who's since fathered at least two illegitimate children, had to be gay. The third was that "when I bring women here they are either so awed that they don't know how to react, or so overwhelmed that they are frightened. Some say 'Uh, this is all very nice but it's a bit too much—give me a call if you want to go the beach or skiing.'" And the last was "the black tie functions, chauffeured cars, hotel suites and public activity might look glamorous to an outsider but it is all hard work." Uh, okay.
Among other things, these comments illustrate that Albert, like Odysseus, is bound to his destiny.
Being Monaco's constitutional monarch is, if you're in the driver's seat, not a job to take lightly. Executive power belongs solely to the reigning prince, who is said to derive his power from God, and He appoints the government and proposes all laws to an 18-member National Council. To a great degree the prince is Monaco and Monaco is the prince. Monaco Inc., as the principality is sometimes called, is run like a family business.
Albert, whose mother Grace Kelly was killed in a car crash in 1982 on the day Sonia was born, had a multilingual, multicultural upbringing and his reign brings a much-needed breath of fresh air to his country. And of all the world's leaders, he'd be the first to endorse the MedTrek. After all, the athletic Amherst-educated prince participated in the Winter Olympics and has competed in a few of the marathons run through Monaco, France and Italy.
Beyond the palace is the National Assembly, the Ministry of Justice and the neo-Romanesque Saint-Pierre Cathedral, where Princess Grace and Prince Rainier are entombed. Then I saunter by the homes of Albert's sisters, Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie. Stephanie's four-story-high Clos Saint-Martin, orange-colored and comparatively garish with Florentine balustrades, adjoins Princess Caroline's more modest Clos Saint-Pierre across from the Oceanographic Museum and gardens. I reported on the lives of the sisters for over a decade and, while I enjoyed tracking their peccadilloes and growing pains, I don't miss them. Nor, I'm sure, do they miss me.
Past the national jail, where contrary to rumor few cells actually have sea views, is the descent to the port and Stars 'N' Bars, the principality's hot sports bar and night club. Located in a revamped industrial section of the principality near the Monaco Yacht Club, Stars 'N' Bars was launched by Kate Powers, a Saint Louis-born American raised in Monaco, in the early 1990s. It used to be a de rigueur late-night stop for Prince Albert, who Kate frequently encouraged to sing and dance on her stage.
Monaco's port has been enlarged by an impressive 600 million euro project that included the placement of a 352-meter dike tugged up the Mediterranean from Algeciras. This unique floating breakwater further protects the harbor from the sea, doubles the number of pleasure boats berths, and enables large cruise ships to visit Monaco so passengers can spread their wealth.
"Almost every big infrastructure project in Monaco is innovative, unique, expensive and complicated in conception, planning, technology and execution," boasts Patrice Cellario, the director of the government's department of urban management. Cellario tells me about the blasting required to create the cavern for the underground railway station and the dam built to hold back the sea during the construction of the Grimaldi Forum conference center. The port expansion, he says, adds another few hectares to Monaco's land mass. Hmm, maybe the place will even be bigger than Manhattan someday.
These projects combine to improve the plethora of athletic, business, cultural, residential, scientific, social and tourism-oriented facilities that contribute to the image of luxury and glamour in revenue-rich Monaco. There are still occasional, and usually justified, accusations of financial shenanigans but Somerset Maugham's claim that Monaco is a "sunny place for shady people" is less and less apropos. It's now a sunny place for made and moneyed people.
Since I'm not one of them, I grab a five-euro lunch of calamari and rice from an outdoor vendor and sit on a bench just above the gigantic outdoor saltwater pool on the port. Up the hill is the Casino that made the principality synonymous with glitter, glamour and gambling almost from the moment it opened in 1856, though it wasn't until 1878 that the building designed by Charles Garnier, the architect behind the Paris Opera, was inaugurated. Today the main Casino is considered an architectural curiosity and its marble columns, decorative murals, cabaret and adjoining opera, which was "authentically renovated" between 2003-2005, attract over one million tourists a year.
Nearby is the celebrated Hôtel de Paris. If I were to spend the night here I'd check into the Churchill Suite, the only room on the eighth floor. That spacious complex, where Prince of musical fame and Michael Jackson used to hang out, is definitely not where I'll be bunking tonight. But I do enter the hotel lobby to, like other Monacophiles, rub the right foot of the bronze horse carrying Louis XIV for some additional good luck.
My fondest Monte-Carlo memory doesn't have anything to do with the horse's foot, gambling, or even the time I asked chef and restaurateur Alain Ducasse to prepare a private menu for twenty to be served in the Churchill Suite. It dates from a memorable faux pas I made when I interviewed Princess Caroline for the first time in a small office above the opera. As things got underway, I politely tried to light her cigarette with a long fragile wooden royal match. The slender stick broke and caught my notebook on fire. It could have burnt down the entire building which, of course, would make this a much more interesting tale. But I'll never forget Princess Caroline's immediate reaction.
"This is a hot interview," the princess joked without missing a beat. She'd had the same quick repartee a few years earlier when I asked her to interpret a Keith Haring mural that she inaugurated at the local hospital.
An elevator whisks me from the hotel lobby to sea level where I enter a glitzy five-story glass-enclosed seaside complex called Les Thermes Marins de Monte-Carlo, or the seawater thermal baths. The center is based on the centuries-old practice of thalassotherapy that employs ingredients from mineral-rich seas and oceans for prevention, healing and relaxation through marine hydrotherapy. Though the algae are imported from Brittany and some mud comes from the Dead Sea, seawater is obtained from a pipe extending 600 meters into the Mediterranean.
About my only claim to fame here is that I had treatments in the same tub as Caroline and her father Prince Rainier, though not at the same time. Ritual bathing is traceable to both the Egyptians and the Greeks but was it anything like this?
"This is the state of the art of thalassotherapy," says Dr. Yves Tréguer, the spa's creator, as he shows me through the complex. "The Romans, Greeks and Egyptians never had it so good."
I walk through the tunnel underneath the Fairmont Monte-Carlo Hôtel and try to imagine what the sea to my right will look like once a Fontvieille-like sea reclamation project is completed around 2015. It's just a few steps to the serene Japanese Garden where I stand for a few moments on the "Taiko" bridge that, according to Shintoists, illustrates the difficult journey towards the gods. Then I pass the Grimaldi Forum, two-thirds of it below sea level, built between 1992-2000.
The big surprise of the day occurs on Larvotto Beach where two bodiless legs are stretched on the sand. I blink, scratch my eyes and take out my binoculars for a better view. Maybe, I think, the sunbather's upper torso and head are buried under the sand. Or maybe this is the bottom half of an invisible man. It turns out that a legless woman nearby has taken off her two prosthetic limbs and put them a few feet away while she tans. Absolutely surreal.
The Summer Sporting Club, where I've attended more concerts, dinners and gala benefits than I care to count, is the next seaside attraction. The two most regal charity events here are the summertime Red Cross Ball and the springtime Rose Ball. And which one should you attend if you're forced to accept just one invitation?
"I feel much more motivated and concerned by the Red Cross Ball than most other official black-tie events in Monaco," Prince Albert told me one night before heading to nearby Le Jimmy'z discotheque. "I even choose the menu. If the food's no good, it's my fault."
I take a quick walk through the new Monte-Carlo Bay Hôtel and Resort and, a little further along, enter the Monte-Carlo Beach Hôtel that is, despite its name, located just across the Monaco-France "invisible" border in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The only way to spend a decent summer afternoon here is to rent a private tent or cabana, which has a chest of drawers, lounge chairs, tables, towels, mattresses and other amenities. Unfortunately the experience costs more than an expensive hotel room in Spain.
The hotel's sandy beach is adjacent to a fifty-meter saltwater swimming pool and the venue, especially the setting of La Vigie restaurant, is so ideal that it's difficult to quibble with the brochure's description of "luxury, calm and sensual pleasure, in endless sunshine, alongside one of the Mediterranean's most beautiful shores."
Outside the hotel lobby is a trail heading up past the Villa de la Vigie, once occupied by designer Karl Lagerfeld, to the chemin des douaniers leading to Cap Martin. I've known Lagerfeld since 1979 when I convinced him to appear on the cover of "The Paris Metro" in a John Travolta-like pose at Le Palace discotheque in Paris. It's unfortunate that the philosophic designer, who's a good friend of Princess Caroline's and still lists Monaco as his official residence, isn't around today because I'd love to get his Germanic take on the MedTrek.
My next stop, Cap Martin, is not only particularly renowned for its castle built in the tenth century to rebuff the wily Saracens and the procession held every August that depicts the Passion of the Christ. It's also the location of President Mobutu Sese Seko's former luxurious estate that was fastidiously maintained for impromptu visits when the dictator tired of war-torn Zaire and its down-in-the-dumps capital of Kinshasa, where I first interviewed him in 1974. Mobutu's palatial home in this town of 14,000 featured everything from security cameras and armed personnel to neatly swept walks that flow down the steep hill past his pool to the Mediterranean.
One entrance to the three-story ochre-colored mansion called Villa del Mare is at the dead end of the regally named but narrow Avenue Imperatrice Eugenie in the private Domaine du Cap Martin. Behind the gates are thyme-and-lavender scented flowering gardens containing pine, bamboo, olive, lemon and eucalyptus trees. The villa, marble driveway, ubiquitous garden lights, sculpted plants and imperial looking crests above windows protected by electric white shutters were financed by funds Mobutu stashed away in foreign accounts during over two decades in power. The place is worth about $50 million and used to cost the people of Zaire about $12,000 a month to maintain.
"His staff were very friendly when they shopped and the bills were always paid promptly," Marsou Viano, who owns a local café, tells me. "There were probably some very good reasons that he was so well guarded but he provided a lot of work for people living here."
The Zairian president is hardly the town's most celebrated resident. Churchill, Coco Chanel, William Butler Yeats and Christina Onassis were probably more prominent. But the contrast between Mobutu's stark African reality and his Riviera fantasy reality was so extreme that I think of Mobutu whenever I'm in town.
The popular footpath around Cap Martin passes beneath Mobutu's old haunt but, since he's dead, I have no desire to see the place again. I round the headland to get my first view of the Italian coast and approach Menton, often called the "Pearl of France" and the hot bed of European aristocracy in the 19th century. Menton, which like Nice became part of France in 1860, claims to be the warmest spot on the Riviera and a billboard contends that the "city is a garden," which is why its annual Lemon Festival is one of the prime tourist attractions.
Foreigners, particularly the English, are credited with developing many of the Belle poque gardens here. Sir Lawrence Johnston, the renowned landscaper who created Hidcote Manor in England, laid out the Serre de la Madone garden between 1919 and 1939. The "water stairways" at Le Clos du Peyronnet were designed by Humphrey Waterfield and the Villa Fontana Rosa with its Jardin des Romanciers was created in 1920 by Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco-Ibanez.
I walk up the steps from the sea to the Parvis Saint-Michel in the old town and admire a mosaic of the Grimaldi coat of arms, a reminder that the Monaco's royals ruled the place at one point in the Middle Ages. Then I recall a simple description of Menton by Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand novelist who lived here in the 1920s: "My house faces the sea: on my right is the old town with its little port and pepper plants growing on a tiny quay. This old town…is the loveliest place I have ever set my eyes on."
The march towards Italy is on the broad Promenade de la Mer that edges along the port past the Plage des Sablettes. I admire the collection of palm trees at the Jardin Maria Serena and make a quick side trip to Val Rameh to see a Sophora Toromiro, the mythical tree from Easter Island purchased by Lord Radcliffe at the beginning of the 19th century.
When I finally reach the Poste Frontière Saint Ludovic Mentho, the dilapidated border checkpoint and customs office is closed due to the frontierless Europe. Though there's a functioning custom's office a kilometer up the hill, there's no formality, sense of accomplishment or anything else at this one-time bustling seaside border. I do think, because I could use a McFlurry about now, that the old customs' building would make a great drive-through McDonald's.
Once across the border, I have a cappuccino and spend a few minutes listening to Italians croon, which is what they do whenever they open their mouths. Ah, there's still an Italy. It's dusk but I managed to MedTrek in three countries in one day and, for the record, can tell you that it's precisely a 3,595-kilometer walk along the seaside from the French/Italian border to the Moroccan/Algeria border.
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