We stopped again in Pisa after many years, and visited the medieval city of Lucca for the first time, as well as Portofino, with its views along the coast. An interesting side trip was into the hills of Carrara to see the marble quarries (Photo by rdesai). Coming up from Tuscany along the Italian Riviera around Genoa and into France into the French Riviera, the autostrada is particularly amazing. The whole area is mountains, cut by valleys pointing to the sea. Picture folding a sheet of paper back and forth to get a pleated, accordeon affect, then stick a pin through the paper. As the pin goes through mountains and over valleys, that's the autostrada. Come out of a tunnel and go over a bridge, again and again.

The term Riviera is Italian for seaside (riva=shore, riverbank, like French rive). The French use the term Côte d'Azur (Azure Coast) for their southeast coast. It's English speakers who use the Italian term Riviera for the French stretch of coast. If the word were French, it would appear as Rivière. It does show that this part of France once belonged to Italy, also shown by such place names as Monaco and Monte Carlo.

Crossing from Italy into France was like crossing from Connecticut to Massachusetts. And continuing to use Euros from one country to another was a delight. But to come back to Britain--dig out those pounds sterling.

La Côte d'Azur: Nice   We stayed in Nice. Nice is nice enough, pardon the pun, but there are many nice towns along the coast here. The best thing to come out of Nice is Nice Salad, usually known, even in English, as Salade Niçoise. It's amazing what adding both tuna and anchovies to a salad can do to it. We had it several times.

We came to Nice for old times' sake (also, the hotel was free, on points). We both had a sabbatical in 1971-2, and lived in Europe, travelling and studying, for two four-month periods each of those summers. In October 1971, thirty years ago last October, we came to Nice to return our leased car and stayed for a while near the railroad station in a hotel which, in my mind, takes on the romance of the garret in La Bohème. We then took the train to Genoa, where we sailed back to the US on the Yugoslavian freighter Tuhobić, eleven days of rough North Atlantic seas, with a final diversion to Boston because of the longshoremen's strike in New York. Anyway, at the time we said, if we came back to Nice, we'd stay on the Promenade des Anglais (Promenade of the English), the seaside boulevard originally laid out in the early 1800's by resident Englishmen. And so we did, thirty-plus years later.

On that earlier visit, we went to the beach in Nice. It is not a sand beach, but consists of galets, or pebbles. Granted they are rounded and not sharp like gravel, but it feels like you're walking barefoot on a gravel driveway. I remember we both got down on our hands and knees to make it easier to get to the water.

On this visit, we did drive by the Nice railway station to see if we recognized anything, but there was nothing but a lot of traffic. Not far from the station, though, Michelin told us to go see something, and I'm glad we did. Early in the 20th Century there was a large presence of Russian nobility in this area, and there are several Russian Orthodox cathedrals along this stretch of coast. We went to see the one in Nice, which is the largest one outside of Russia. It was in beautiful condition, and I peeked in as an evening service was going on, with beautiful choral singing. It was poignant to see that Czar Nicholas himself dedicated it in 1912, only five years before the revolution.

La Côte d'Azur: Monaco   Monaco should have disappeared in the 1950's, absorbed into France. The reason bachelor Prince Ranier came to the US then and ended up going home with Grace Kelly was because according to law, if there was no male heir in the Grimaldi line, Monaco went to France. Well, after two daughters, Prince Albert was born, so the Monégasques are back in the money-making business, and continue to pay no taxes.

We visited Monaco, and the area of it where the Casino is, Monte Carlo, on that earlier visit. It's upscale, and pleasant enough. It's tiny--just a matter of acres. I think I recall it would fit into Central Park three times. But they're trying to grow and grow in no space. First they put up a number of skyscrapers--skyscrapers on the Riviera! Then they filled in land into the sea. We just drove through this time, and it seems claustrophobic--road overpasses everywhere, still very upscale, everything cheek-by-jowl. Maybe Prince Albert won't have a male heir.

La Côte d'Azur: Cannes   There are a lot of "beach" towns along the riviera, Antibes, St Tropez, and so on. We visited a few, and they are pleasant enough. But I think I've found the place: Cannes. We were there just for the afternoon, but it's larger than the others, sophisticated, has the Film Festival (with stars' handprints in the sidewalk), and we enjoyed strolling along the seaside boulevard, La Croisette, and having a pleasant dinner there, too. Cannes is the place.

Cannes are reeds, as in sugar cane. Curiously, it's again an Englishman who got the village started as a resort destination, again in the early 1800's. Lord Brougham, who invented the brougham carriage, wasn't able to reach Nice because of a quarrantine, so he went to Cannes, liked it, and started an "English colony" there. There's a Rue Brougham in Cannes.

”Valet” Parking   I'm reminded that we had to use valet parking at the hotel in Nice, so let me go off on one of my tangents.

It seems to me that hotel and restaurant operation today is based on the way wealthy people used to live normally. In centuries past, working class people didn't travel, and middle class people stayed in inns, served by the innkeeper's wife. When wealthy people did travel, they expected a staff equivalent to what they had at home. If her ladyship had a cook and dining room servants, restaurants developed having a waitstaff as well. If she had chambermaids to make her bed and clean and a butler to run the household, hotels developed with maids and a front desk to run the operation. Now even wealthy people don't usually have that kind of staffing, yet all of us expect to be waited on in restaurants and to have our hotel room serviced as though we had that kind of staffing at home. It's a curious development.

If you saw Upstairs, Downstairs or Gosford Park or any show showing wealthy houses of past eras (a lifestyle that ended with WW2), you also know that when the carriage drove up to the country hourse, a footman stepped up to open the carriage and let down the step (hence, footman) for the riders to get out, then he took care of the horse and carriage, or, in the 1920's and 1930's, the car. This is clearly the origin of valet parking.

It's the name that's ridiculous. All staff had their duties. The chambermaid made beds, the lady's maid took care of the lady of the house, and the valet took care of the gentleman. The footman took care of the coach/car. Picture a valet, as played by John Gielgud or Anthony Hopkins. A car drives up. Gielgud drops the shirts he'd been folding for his lordship, runs downstairs, and ... parks the car? Calling it valet parking is as stupid as calling it chambermaid parking. If you don't want to call it footman parking, then call it courtesy parking or something like that. But we're stuck with the idiotic name valet parking. That's how language works. Often idiocy just gets blended in to become common usage.

French Spelling   The two worst offenders in spelling are English and French. I'll just deal with place names. In English we have the place name Grenich, both in Britain and the US. However, it's not spelled that way. Two additional letters are included to make the spelling Greenwich. Do keep in mind that the reason for these spellings is that's the way it used to be pronounced, but the word changed, keeping the outdated spelling. On the south bank of the Thames is the area known as Southerk (almost rhymes with "southern"). However, you have to know that it's spelled Southwark.

In France, near Paris, you have Mo and So. Only Mo is spelled Meaux. So is one letter longer, as Sceaux. Sceaux do you want to hear that one Meaux time?

In the south, where we travelled, you have Arl, Neem and Can. But they are spelled Arles, Nîmes, and Cannes.

We stopped in two towns whose off-the-wall spellings are my favorites. One is called Eg Mort. The other is Lay Bo.

Eg Mort is spelled--now get this: Aigues-Mortes. With the hyphen. It seems that aigues is an old word for waters (think Spanish aguas), and since the port dried up, the name means Dead Waters. Kind of poignant, in a way.

Lay Bo was once a major source of bauxite, the ore from which aluminum is made. So what? Well, you see, bauxite was named after Lay Bo, whose actual spelling is Les Baux.

Provence   When we left the Côte d'Azur, we made one more stop in the south, in Provence. The local language spoken there is Provençal, and I was glad to see it used on street names, under the French version, and coming into town, along with French on the sign showing the name of the town. (I mentioned a similar situation last summer in Wales, the Republic of Ireland, and to a much lesser extent, in Scotland.) Provençal is a Latinate language, just like French, Italian, and Spanish. (I do not use the foolish term "Romance language".)

Anticipation   I mentioned last summer that all the countries in the European Union are gradually issuing licence plates, apparently as they come up for renewal, with a blue area over on the left which includes the ID of the country, such as F or GB, and above it, the white circle of stars of the EU. I saw a number of Polish cars (I still can't get used to seeing Eastern europeans in the west) that had the blue field, with the letters PL, but since Poland is only waiting to become a member, instead of the circle of stars it had the Polish flag. I guess they're ready and waiting to join.

Quatorze Juillet   Bastille Day, the Fourteenth of July, the Quatorze Juillet, fell on a Sunday this year. It was a miserable day. Different regions have wind problems. Calilfornia has the Santa Annas, Germany and Switzerland have the Föhn, and France has the Mistral. All day on the Quatorze it was overcast, and the wind was constant. Trees were leaning over, you got windswept everytime you went outside, what a bother.

Fortunately, the day before was not only beautiful, but we had a good time. In the afternoon we walked thru Aix-en-Provence, sat in a cafe on the beautiful Cours Mirabeau, and watched a wedding moving from the civil service at the city hall over to the church. In the evening we went to Aigues-Mortes (Eg Mort). I had seen it on a map years ago, and the name just intrigued me. It's not only an interesting place, we had a great time. It's almost square, just five blocks by five blocks, and entirely surrounded by its medieval wall (Photo by Ingo Mehling), with numerous gates. Interestingly, very little has been built up near the wall, so the wall really stands out. The main square is called Place St Louis, with a statue of Louis IX (Saint Louis), since he sailed from Aigues-Mortes going off on the Crusades. (History just seeps from every pore.) After we had dinner on the Place, since it was the Saturday night of Bastille Day weekend, they had a band playing really nice music, so after watching for a while, we joined in for one dance on the cobblestones.