Côte d'Azur

Planning a trip to the Côte d'Azur

The southeastern strip of Provence has long gone by the moniker of 'The Azure Coast," a dreamy nickname which—over-development and over-exposure aside—it still manages to live up to. We also call it the French Riviera.

It stretches roughly from the Italy border to Saint-Tropez, passing Nice, Antibes, Cannes, and countless smaller towns and beach spots along the way.

Côte d'Azur beaches are ranked with rule-straight lines of color-coded umbrellas fronting resort towns and swank villages where the Beautiful People since the era of the jet set have gone to soak up rays and slink around in the latest in après-beach fashions.

After a thrilling drive along the twisty-turned roads, visits to tiny museums contain works by the artists who flocked here to create (Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Renoir), and an afternoon by the pool or the surfside, you can start each evening off indulging in fine wines and even finer French cuisine.

Truth be told, most of France's top chefs, and up-and-coming pretenders to that status, would rather garner their Michelin starts in Provence than in Paris, and this attitude rubs off even on homey bistros.

After a two-hour culinary feast, it's time to hit the casinos. These aren't the glitzy themed monoliths of Vegas, or Atlantic City's old school gambling hotels. We're talking the elegant sort of casinos where James Bond was once wont to match wits with agents of SPECTRE over vodka martinis and a few hands of blackjack, uncovering an important clue before absconding to a suite upstairs accompanied by a comically-named bombshell with a weakness for corny one-liners and tuxedoed men whose wristwatches can shoot laser beams. (Sorry; I recently bought a boxed set of 007 DVDs.)

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