Nice in 4 days

Flowers, courgette flowers, chard and Nice olives from local growers, Tuesday to Sunday mornings; on Mondays a flea market fills the whole street.

In the late afternoon the tour groups leave the lanes between Place Rossetti and the Cours Saleya, and the ochre façades catch their best light.

The public beach below the old town: no sand, only fist-sized pebbles, a steep way into the water and clear sea in the city centre.

Allow an hour and a half to climb, see the waterfall and both viewpoints, one over the rooftops and sea, the other over the port.

A twenty-minute loop past hand-painted wooden fishing boats, yachts and the Corsica ferry, best at the end of the day when the ochre walls glow.

Built in Chagall's lifetime with André Hermant for the seventeen Biblical Message paintings he gave France, with a blue-windowed auditorium worth the visit alone.

Matisse lived in Nice from 1917 until his death, and this 17th-century Genoese villa holds works he kept, including cut-out gouaches, beside Roman ruins.

Half an hour's walk to the pink-domed Negresco, with free blue chairs facing the sea and planes landing low over the water to the west.