Menton: France’s Best Kept Secret
This little town is a vestige of how the French Riviera must have looked before developers moved in and poured concrete on it.
The painting shows a dark alleyway, painted in dingey tones of beige and grey. At the end of the narrow street is an arched passageway leading under a house. The only flashes of colour are the dusty green shutters, and the clothes on a washing line dangling lopsidedly on the left hand side.
Grandad’s Paintings
It was a picture my Grandad had painted in 1954. That was the year he had spent all his savings on a rusty old motorbike. He proposed to my Grandma, who said yes! and jumped in the sidecar. They got on a boat to Europe (from the United Kingdom) and drove around. My Grandad was a passionate painter. He would go on to design Princess Diana and Prince Charles’ wedding invitations, (Yep, I’m shamelessly name-dropping , because I’m super proud of my Grandad). Back in the early 50s, he captured their journey in a series of paintings and sketchbooks.
When Grandad passed away last year, he left behind him a hoarder-like house filled with decades of old glasses and used sponges, broken things he never got around to fix, and entire rooms full of magnificent artwork. One of them was this painting of a dark street, that my mother and I were slightly fascinated by. The atmosphere it conveys is one of homely intimacy, reigned over by a sort of bleakness. The buildings are beautiful but the viewer is filled with sadness more than awe.
“This one’s in a place called Menton, in the bottom corner of France, right next to Italy”, my mum told me. “You should go and see where it was painted”. I was planning a trip down there, to see a friend in nearby Nice. “Yeah, I’ll go and find it,” I said. My mum sighed, “there’s not much hope, though. A lot has changed down there since 1954.”
A trip to the Riviera
I drove in my grandparent’s ghostly tire tracks, diagonally across France from the North Western tip, to the most South-Eastern point. As I reached the Mediterranean coast, I began to see what my mother meant. The French Riviera, today, is 550 miles of concrete. A coastal road nudges the sea…
