l in a very real sense a boundary line. The word Riviera,
which has kept its Italian form, was applied historically to the coast
lands of the Gulf of Genoa. From Antibes to Genoa we had the Riviera
di Ponente, and from Genoa to Spezia the Riviera di Levante. Only
after Napoleon III exacted the district of Nice as part payment for
French intervention in the Italian war of liberation was the term
"French Riviera" gradually extended to include the coast far west of
Antibes.

What was added to France under Napoleon III has lost its purely Italian
character. But it has not gained the stamp of France. From Antibes to
Menton, the Riviera is more remarkably and undeniably international
than any other bit of the world I have ever seen. Some of the old
towns back from the coast are becoming French in the new generation.
But along the coast you are not in France until you reach Antibes. You
may have thought that you were in France at Menton and Beaulieu and
Nice. But the contrast of Antibes and Grasse, which are French to the
core, makes you realize that sixty years is not sufficient to destroy
the traditions and instincts of centuries.

At Antibes and along the closely built up coast and between Antibes and
Cannes, the international atmosphere is by no means lost. It requires
the contrast of Cannes with Saint-Raphael to show the difference
between a cosmopolitan and a genuine French watering place. But the
French atmosphere begins to impress one at Antibes. A knowledge of
history is not needed to indicate that here was the old frontier.

Since the days of the Greeks Antibes has been a frontier fortress.
Ruins of fortifications of succeeding centuries show that the town has
always been on the same site, on the coast east of the Cape, looking
towards Nice. Antipolis was a frontier fortress, built by the Phoceans
of Marseilles to protect them from the aggressive Ligurians of Genoa.
Nice was an outpost, whose name commemorates a Greek victory over the
Ligurians. At the mouth of the Var, from antiquity to modern times,
races and religions, building against each other political systems for
the control of Mediterranean commerce, have met in the final throes of
conflicts the issue of which had been decided elsewhere--and often long
before the fighting died out here. Phoenicians and Greeks,
Carthaginians and Romans, Greeks and Romans, Romans and Gauls, Gauls
and Teutonic tribes, Franks and Saracens, Spanish and French and