Cros-de-Cagnes Travel Guide

Sums it up really.

The villa name captures the official non-existence of the Haut-de-Cagnes and its treasures. Which is fine by me.

Suffice it to say the owners of Number 32 enjoy a magnificent location half way back down towards Cros-de-Cagnes.

Marvelous square at the entrance to Chateau Grimaldi. One adventurous visitor scuttles by. Where are the coaches? There are none.

The perfect relaxed informal place to enjoy an inexpensive meal in a perfect unhurried atmosphere, surrounded by real people. No coachloads of tourists, just a human scale.

You can't imagine a contemporary architect drawing plans to create this. Its another time and place. No building regulations, no urban plot ratios, no investment return profiles. just the result of human interaction with craft skills. Somewhere the modern urban planner left out the "beauty", the aesthetic without function.

Not for Cagnes the rich dark Venetian Red walls and Terracota hues of italienate France - more the gentle pinks that offset wrought iron balconies decked out by proud owners in rich floral displays .

Squeezed within the ramparts are homes worthy of Gandalf The Hobbit. Tiny doorways and eccentric windows, the very opposite of modern factory symetry and standardisation.

Here a house in Haut-de-Cagnes proudly displys its age - 1315. It is difficult to imagine life 700 hundred years ago, its brutality and cruelty, its community , yet before you is this legacy.

Thirties Parisien caberet singer Suzy Solidor had the idea of having all her artistic bohemian friends paint her. The Chateau houses over forty of the hundred and fifty paintings of this final collection, and the effect of totally uniquely intriguing.

The same figure and face is captured by totally different artists. The Lempicka has glossy cubist forms, the Cocteau signature economical black outlines. The subject is the same. The theory that art eschews photographic rendering but somehow captures essence is challenged. What is revealed is the idioscyncracy of artistic vision, the triumph of style over substance, and not the reverse.

For the three euro entry ticket to the Chateau, you feel you have been undercharged