WHAT and where is the Riviera?
It is the sunniest, warmest and driest district on the Continent of Europe. It lies along the northern shore of the Mediterranean.
It has no defined limits, but is generally understood to extend from Hyères, some sixty miles eastward of Marseilles, to the neighbourhood of distant Leghorn (or Livorno), so that it is partly in France and partly in Italy.
The inland boundary is fixed by the highlands of the hinterland, for the climate which makes the Riveria is the offspring of sheltered, sunny lowlands, and as the high ground is nowhere far from the sea, the Riviera is but a narrow strip.
A Playground of the World
There was a time when the Riviera was regarded chiefly as a health resort, visited almost solely by those suffering from bronchial or pulmonary troubles and able to flee from the rigours of an English winter. Reports of the beauty of the country, the charm of the climate, and the cheapness of living drew to the favoured region many who had not the excuse of sickness for their visit.
The latter class has gone on increasing out of all proportion to the former, so that now the number of those who go to the Riviera for their health is very small compared with the number who go frankly for their pleasure, not only from the British Isles, but from all over the world.
The number of British visitors taking their cars and enjoying a motor tour of the Riviera is increasing year by year. The Riviera has indeed become a playground of the world.
There are race courses, golf courses, and tennis courts galore, with a succession of tournaments in which world-renowned players engage. Polo is played, there is coursing, and need it be mentioned that practically all the year round there is sea- bathing-not merely by those who would break the ice rather than miss their morning dip?
Then there are the carnivals and battles of flowers, motor races and regattas, and a ceaseless round of indoor gaieties balls, dances, gala dinners, concerts and, at the Casinos, gambling, although one may go there, as do the great majority, to enjoy good musicial entertainment, and never see the gaming tables.
Yet it is not the sports and pastimes which attract increasing crowds of visitors from northern latitudes. The supreme attraction consists of the twenty-six or twenty-seven days of sunshine in every winter month. Sunshine which begins the moment the Lord of Day appears on the eastern horizon and continues until he sinks to rest in the west.
Sunshine which comes from a sky of intense blue, a sky without that delicate grey veil which on a bright summer day in England almost always tones down the blue of the great celestial vault.
And for the same reason that the sunshine is so brilliant and the sky so blue during the day, the moon and the stars are more brilliant than they are between the parallels of latitude which embrace the British Isles.
The French call the coast of their portion of the Riviera is la Cote d’Azur, a name which speaks of the marvellous blue sky overhead and the equally marvellous blue sea stretching away to the southern horizon; and the title might aptly be given to the whole of the coast.
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