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By Robert Daley, Author of 30 Books and Bronxville Resident—Half the Year

Feb. 1, 2017:  Here in Nice, we did our food shopping late Thanksgiving eve. Did not see a turkey on sale in any of the shops. We don’t know a single American here, not one. It rained hard all Thanksgiving Day, so our holiday banquet was just the two of us on our balcony overlooking the Place Mozart Gardens, the rain beating on the awning above us. 

Although it is late November, the temperature was 70 degrees, and we dined on “daurades”—I think the name is Sea Bream in English—that Peggy baked in olive oil and herbs surrounded by pieces of sweet potato and carrots with fresh green beans on the side, with a gold-medal winning Côtes de Provence rosé to drink, and baked apples fresh from the oven for dessert. We talked some of the good old days in what seems, looking back, our enormous multi-national circle of friends, most of whom, because of deaths, money, and other problems, have now left the Riviera for good.

In the last week, we have made a number of day trips, trying to cram as much as possible into our Nicois life before it ends. It can’t last much longer, can it, at this age? Last Friday we drove down into Provence to Lorgues, which seems to me the center of the Provence wine country, found that a terrific restaurant we know there was closed, and had (by French standards) a lousy lunch elsewhere.

Afterward, we drove on a few miles to the Chateau St. Julien of Aille, which produces my favorite rosé:  a place of handsome old buildings, though the facilities within represent the latest there is in winemaking, and there bought a case to take home.

Provence wines, and especially its rosés, used to be denigrated, but today this is the up-and-coming wine region of France, still relatively cheap but more and more famous and prized. The rows and rows of vines around us had been deprived of their grapes six or more weeks ago but still had their leaves, which were turning all kinds of colors, a kind of Provence version of a New England autumn, not walls and walls of color but fields and fields that sometimes looked on fire. The hillsides were mostly pines, with here and there lonely trees that had turned bright yellow.

The next day, we drove 20 miles from Nice up to Luceram along the gorges, the river churning below us as the road climbed. Again, the gorgeous colors, the greens and bright yellows, and very occasionally a tree that had turned red, and then the mountains closed in on us. Luceram is an old perched village. The church is high up and filled with paintings, many by Louis Brea, that date back more than 500 years. Climbing up to the church, mostly on stone staircases cut into the rock, we kept stepping into gorgeous little squares with flowers on the balconies and in front of the doorways. Brea did nearly all his work in or near Nice and is therefore relatively unknown. To me he was as good as Fra Angelico or Filippo Lippi or any of those 15th-century Italians. 

And then on Thanksgiving Eve day, we drove across into Italy to Badalucco for lunch with friends at Ca Meo, six of us in all, two Frenchwomen, an Englishman, a Swiss woman, her husband, who was born of Russian parents in China and now holds Belgian and Israeli passports, and Peggy and me, New Yorkers. The restaurant is a former mill, and the river below was pouring past, heavier and louder than I’ve ever seen it.  The restaurant is vaulted rooms, fireplaces burning. The usual three-hour lunch, 12 or 15 courses, most of them based on the mushroom the Italians call porcini, and the French call seppes. A wonderful local, non-name wine to drink. And after it, the lovely drive back along the gorges and mountains and autumn colors to the coast and home.

And so it goes, life on the Côte d’Azur. There must be people who would reek with frustration reading this.  Places they’ll never get to. But for us, it has been normal all these years. Though, perhaps, not for much longer, I guess. 

About the Writer:   Robert Daley, author of 30 books, and Peggy, his French-born wife, keep an apartment in Nice, where they were married in 1954, and spend half of each year in France. Six of Bob Daley’s books have been adopted for film, most notably Year of the Dragon and Prince of the City. Bob also served six seasons as publicity director for the New York Giants, worked six years in Paris on the foreign staff of the New York Times, and served one year as deputy commissioner of the NYC Police Department. The parents of three grown daughters, the Delays divide their time between an apartment here in Bronxville and in Nice, France.