DAY 53 - MON 4/22 - Matisse et Chagall

We're starting to realize that our 2-month dream sojourn in France is coming to an end. We only have 10 more days. It has just flown by and we still have lots more things we want to do...Monaco, Antibes, Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and his chapelle, Leger, Cannes, nature walks, Menton, San Remo (mmmm some good pasta again!), and on and on! We can't believe we may not have time to do all the things we want to do!!

Today actually came off as planned...in fact like clockwork.

At breakfast at the Gran Cafe we ended up talking to new friends Charlie and Nicky, both English, both extremely attractive and married. He is retired and living here for tax reasons, and she is a yacht broker. They are foodies and told us of some good restaurants, one of them way up on the Grande Corniche in La Turbie, at which we immediately made a reservation for tonight at Cafe de la Fontaine, and another one in Italia. Then in came Bernie and Vance, having a boys day out while their wives, Sonja and Linda, were having a girls day out in Nice shopping and doing lunch. We chatted for a while with them and then parted, saying we hoped to see both of them soon.

Our first destination today was the Matisse Museum set on a hill in Cimiez, a very upscale neighborhood of Nice. We parked and walked through a lovely park to get to the museum. It's near the beautiful big old Hotel Regina, where Matisse actually once lived. The museum, housed in an 18th century villa, has been open since January, 1963, and is filled with his paintings, sculptures, drawings, and personal objects left by the artist and his heirs to the city of Nice where he lived from 1918 to 1954 when he died at the age of 85. 

    

    

There are also plans and models of the beautiful little chapelle he designed in Vence in honor of the Dominican nun who took care of him during his long recovery from a cancer operation. 

The museum is an amazing retrospective of his life and his work...you have to be there to fully appreciate it. And believe it or not it was free but just today.

Then we took a short ride over to the Chagall Museum which is in the same Cimiez neighborhood. It had a cute cafe, so we stopped there first for some salads and then made our way over to the entrance. This museum wasn't free, but the audio guide was, which again we couldn't believe. It's devoted to Chagall's treatment of biblical themes. Chagall was born in 1887 in Russia, and in 1937 when he was 50 he became a French citizen. He and his wife donated the works to France, and it's the most important collection of his works ever assembled. It includes oils, pastels, lithos, sculptures, ceramics, mosaics, stained glass windows, and a tapestry. Chagall died in 1985 in Saint Paul de Vence at the age of 97. This museum is an amazing retrospective of his religious themes...and again you have to be there to fully appreciate it.

 

    

Note: when Chagall agreed to donate his entire biblical theme collection to France he did it with the condition that a museum would be built specifically for this purpose. He is the only artist to have collaborated in the design and construction of a museum dedicated to his own works.

These two world-renowned and prolific artists were both born in Russia, both had extremely long lives, and both have monumental museums in the same little community on the Cote d'Azur. How coincidental is that! These two fantastic museums made today a WIN-WIN! We loved them both!

We had a few hours to kill before our dinner reservation at one of the restaurants that our newest friends Charlie and Nicky recommended, Cafe de la Fontaine way up the mountain in La Turbie on the Grande Corniche. So we did some blogging for a while at home and then decided to venture up the corniche early to see the area while it was still light out. The roads weren't as bad as we remembered, and Marty drove slowly, so Jill didn't have to be under the dashboard! 

The Medieval village of La Turbie is right out of a fairy tale, all cobblestone, with tiny streets and little houses all huddled together. There are no cars. The nice thing was that there was nobody around as we explored some of the little streets and took lots of NatGeo type pictures. We think that the town is just too high up and off the beaten path to be inundated with tourists, but in August who knows. 

    

    

    

    

    

The restaurant owner also has a Michelin 2-Etoiles (2-Star) restaurant just nearby right in the old village, which we checked out...we'll see if we want to really splurge, and if we really want to eat that fancy kind of food...been there, done that...we just really prefer good bistros.

    

We then made our way to Cafe de la Fontaine and had a very delicious meal. The place is charming, very reasonable, and no tourists! We loved it! 

The ride home was a little frustrating...it was pitch dark now and the GPS indicated a turn that just did not exist, and then it lost satellite connection probably because we were on some switchback road high up on the mountain. So I ended up just turning it off and Marty made his way down by sheer reckoning, hitting a few hairpins here and there. We knew we would eventually reach sea level, but we weren't quite sure where we would land. In the end we made it back to Beaulieu-sur-Mer safe and sound.

This was another really fantastic day!