The Riviera of the Corniche Road

The Corniche Road in the early 20th century was something else entirely: a ribbon of ambition carved along cliffs that had known no other passage for millennia, linking villages that Rome had founded and that even then felt ancient. Frederick Treves walks this legendary coast between Nice and Mentone with the eyes of both historian and wanderer, uncovering the layers of civilization that built up herePhoenician traders, Roman emperors, medieval monks, and the Belle Époque optimists who blast-cut roads through mountainsides to create the most spectacular drive in Europe. This is travel writing as it used to be: unhurried, curious, full of asides about a ruined tower or a fisherman who remembers when the coast was wilder. Treves captures the Riviera at a hinge moment, just before the age of mass tourism transformed everything, when you could still feel the weight of centuries in every olive grove and hillside path. For anyone who loves old maps, lost worlds, or the particular melancholy of reading about places that have since been loved to death.