Celebrities, Cannes

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Right beside the Palais Des Festivals, you will find various hand prints of celebraties on the floor. Pretty cool knowing " who is who" was there before. The picture shown here is the hand print of the famous actor Bruce Willies.

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Around the Palais is the 'Allee des Stars', which is a chain of hand prints of stars in cement slabs. Each square has a set of hand prints plus the stars name etched in.

It was fun walking around looking at the various stars

The Cannes Film Festival takes place annually in May and for two weeks the town is full of celebrities. Many of them leave their mark in the form of handprints on the pavement slabs outside the Theatre Palais. Here, Susan tries out Sylvester Stallone's hand for size.

The Victorian English royalty loved the south of France, and while the queen herself stayed regularly in Nice at Cimiez, her sons would run wild here in and around Cannes.

In the courtyard of the clocktower and museum notice this marble inscription to one of Queen Victorias two sons.

One son went on to be King Edward VII, the other - Leopold, Duke of Albany, her eighth, was a haemophiliac and who died following a fall on the staircase of the nearby Villa Nevada.

Its worth noting that before the mid-eighteen hundreds it could take several weeks to travel to the South of France. No motor cars (not invented yet) no airplanes (many decades wait to check in) and the "Iron Horse" didn't arrive in the Riviera until the late 1860's. Even when transportation became available it was affordable only to aristocracy and captains of industry. Here is a piece of history carved from a different world.

Another Scottish trained lawyer turned politician, of which England even to this day seems to have an inexhaustible supply, Henry Peter 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, was one of the most prominent of the early British discoverers of the Riviera. Commemorated here in the usual fashion, in a statue.

The Cannes he discovered in the 1830's was a little fishing village of no more than 300 inhabitants. A villa on the Frejus road followed, as did more and more of the good and great of Victorian high society, and by the 1850's Cannes had "arrived"

The British tradition continues to this day. Witness at certain times of year the arrival at Nice airport of the "half-termites" - mother and children off school at half term, heading out to stay with the grandparents at their villa somewhere near Cannes, Antibes or Vence.

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Next to Film palace you will find a set of hand stamps of various persons and pink panther as well :)