Famous Residents in Provence — 15 of Our Favourites

The novel itself may have been set in America, but the post-war themes of immense wealth and corrupted glamour- of tragedy and beauty, boredom and thwarted love- were common to the social scene of the Cote d’Azur of the time, and no doubt Fitzgerald drew some inspiration for his masterpiece from the high society he mingled with on the Riviera. 

Fitzgerald arrived on the Cote d’Azur with his mentally troubled wife Zelda in 1925, at the time when the South of France was just beginning to draw a well-heeled summer crowd. In fact, the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc on Cap d’Antibes, now one of the world’s great celebrity hotels, kept a wing of the hotel open for the Fitzgeralds past April when the rest of the hotel was shuttered up, with the more traditional guests departing for the cooler climes before the hot days of summer arrived. The Murphys, friends of the Fitzgeralds, are in fact credited with the birth of the Cap d’Antibes as a summer social destination, and cleared the beach at La Garoupe of seaweed and rocks in order to make it a little playground for the wealthy. It worked; artists and the well heeled flocked to the South of France to summer on Cap d’Antibes, including Picasso, Hemingway, Rudolph Valentino and Harpo Marx. 

It was a time of wild parties and hedonism, the grim memories of the war years buried in fountains of champagne and hot sleepless nights of dancing and sex and intrigues under the pines. Fitzgerald’s writing perfectly captures the dark seductions and temptations of the flesh that so characterise the French Riviera, as well as the almost mystic light and beauty of the region.

“In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of early fortifications, and the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.”

F.Scott Fitzgerald and his wife returned to the Riviera for two seasons, living in Valescure, before his discovery of his wife’s affair led them to move away to Rome and finally back to America. Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night was set in the 1920’s on the Riviera- the Jazz Age- and has many overwhelming parallels with the world the Fitzgeralds lived amongst. The novel charts the disintegrating relationship between a husband and wife that most commentators take to be a thinly veiled account of Fitzgerald’s own problems with his schizophrenic wife. In another telling similarity, the fictional couple he creates in the novel also convince a hotel on Cap d’Antibes to stay open past April for a summer of glittering parties and wild abandon. Authors are always told to ‘write what you know’, and in conjuring up the darkness and light of the Riviera F.Scott Fitzgerald certainly did that- and in a way that still rings true today.

Cézanne made a feeble attempt to please his father and pursue a degree in law, but after a few years he left Aix for Paris where he studied painting, his passion. His work was not appreciated in Paris and after failing to be admitted into the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he returned to Aix where he was based until his death. His father had reconciled himself with his son's ambition and left him sufficient resources to continue his art.

From 1863 to 1880, none of his works were admitted to the Salon, but this did not deter him, and he continued to paint. It was only after his father died in 1886 that Cezanne's reputation began to grow.

His early works used dark tones, but then Cezanne became friends with Camille Pissarro who introduced him to techniques for capturing natural outdoor light. Cezanne's palet became lighter and brighter, and he began to concentrate on nature and outdoor scenes.

His works began to be shown regularly in Paris from 1895 and by the time he died in 1906 of pneumonia he was extremely well regarded and received young artists wishing to learn from him in his studio in Aix. Only one year before his death, an exhibition of his works in Paris drew an enthusiastic response from other artists, Braque, Picasso who later acknowledged Cézanne's influence.

Amongst his most famous paintings are 'Apples & Oranges', 'The Great Bathers', 'Card Players' and 'Mont St Victoire'.

Although there is no art gallery dedicated to Cezanne in Provence, his works are collected from time to time and exhibited to the public. You may expect a range of still lifes, nude bathers, portraits and endless views of the mountain Sainte-Victoire, with variations of greens, ochre, some blues. But it is so much more than that - the brusque brush strokes that cut this way and that. The white space that means more than space. The roughness that reveals the essence of Provence. The dynamic power of the artist to show stillness in a canvas of live color. No reproduction or print does justice to his mastery of the brush.

Verne anchored his yacht Le Saint Michel II off the Cap, where more than 150 years later the superyachts now gather in great force in the months of July and August, their tenders buzzing back and forth between the exceedingly glamorous Hotel Eden Roc. He rented the Villa Les Chenes Vertes, where he worked on the stage adaption of one of his most famous works, Around the World in 80 days, and would on later visits work on 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea and A Voyage to the Moon. One must wonder what images of spaceships and aliens his mind conjured up as he looked across the sparkling sea and ancient ramparts of Antibes. I hope a UFO landed on the castle tower - now the Picasso Museum - at least once in his daydreams.

Pleasingly, while Verne wrote of fantastical moon landings completely out of the reach of mankind at the time of writing, his villa on the Cap would later be briefly occupied by the man who made the spacesuits of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins. Here, fiction and future reality collided- as was the mission of Verne’s writing. He aimed to use the breadth of scientific knowledge and potential in his fiction, researching heavily and hypothesising to the limits of imagination. For this reason- this tremendous gift of taking new scientific discovery and pushing it beyond its known limits into adventure fiction- he is known as one of the fathers of the sci-fi genre.

No doubt the man would be endlessly pleased if he knew that a spacecraft would one day be named after him, and would in 2008 carry some of his notes and copies of From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Centre of the Earth into orbit. His writing showed the 19th century world the dream of space travel, and in the end his very words, written in his hand, would travel to space. There’s something just lovely about that.

He also found inspiration in tales of shipwrecks and derring-do upon the oceans, and the story goes that he tried to stow away on a ship to the West Indies when he was only 11 years old. According to the tale, his father caught him just before the ship set sail and he was made to promise that he would limit his future travels ‘to his imagination.’ The story is almost certainly false, but imagine the literary loss the world would have suffered had this young boy not delved into the travels of his imagination, and grown up to be one of the most translated authors on earth.

His fascination with adventure at sea stemmed from a young age. When he was at school, one of his teachers was a widow to a ship captain who had disappeared on a journey 30 years before. The teacher reportedly liked to tell Verne and the other pupils that her captain husband had been shipwrecked on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe, and would one day find his way back to her. This theme of separated love would return many times in his books- as would that of thwarted love, drawn from Verne’s own experiences of not being permitted to marry his first two great loves. He was not yet considered a suitable marriage prospect due to his aspirations as a novelist, but things would soon change as his literary star rose with the years, and he would eventually fall in love with and marry the young widow Honorine de Viane Morel.

He would spend years on Cap d’Antibes, yet he wasn’t the most voluble fan of the Riviera. ‘I have paid for this climate’, he wrote to his publisher after several visits. ‘I’ve been here three times and each time I’ve had neuralgia, sore throats and ear abscesses.’ Certainly the Mediterranean’s reputation as a place to cure illnesses was not working terribly well on Monsieur Verne.

Les Chenes Vertes is now 152 Boulevard President Kennedy, but you can still find his name engraved on the gate post of this magnificent white villa on the sea, where he wrote of ‘impossible’ things, many of which would, and still could, become possible.

A museum dedicated to Jules Verne can be found in Nantes.

The writer of many critically acclaimed novels including The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American had arrived in Antibes in 1965, after the British government apparently gave warning that he had until the end of the year to leave the country to avoid being jailed for tax fraud. If Greene had not been engaged in spying for MI6 it is unlikely that the authorities would have been so lax, and this great literary light may have instead been writing from behind bars.

Rather than a jail cell, Graham Greene chose the narrow cobbled streets and Mediterranean light of Antibes, where he was a common sight each day as he lunched at Café Felix by the archway to the port. Café Felix, made famous by his patronage, has since lost any noticeable charm, but in those days he sat with Yvonne Cloette, a lady ‘friend’ and her dog, Sandy, and drank his customary dry martini without lemon and a bottle of the local Château des Garcinières. (Apparently his fondness for the place was partly due to the waiters keeping whatever was left in the bottle for his return the next day.)

His estranged wife Vivien, living back in England, was long accustomed to his affairs, for Graham had a famous weakness for women. As well as many affairs, he documented no less than 42 encounters with prostitutes. His wife said years later, ‘With hindsight, he was a person who should never have married’, and certainly his more serious writing delved deeply into morality and the struggles of fidelity and the human condition. He wrote to Vivien once that he was ‘a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life’, which does pose certain problems for married bliss.

His writing danced across genres, between serious literature with Catholic tones and espionage thrillers, what he called ‘entertainments’. He was famous for saying ‘every writer should have a chip of ice in his heart’, although he certainly didn’t display this callousness when, in anger at treatment of a female friend in court, he accused the Nicoise authorities of colluding with the local mafia, in a pamphlet called ‘J’accuse-the dark side of Nice.’ An interview with him held in his Antibes apartment at the time of the drama has him overheard on the telephone saying, ‘They'd like to shoot me, I know… They'd like to kill me but I'm too well-known.’ The likely truth of Greene’s accusation was confirmed many years later when the mayor of Nice was jailed for corruption.

He adored Antibes, particularly in the winter months when, as he wrote in May We Borrow Your Husband,

"Gusts of rain blew along the ramparts, and the emaciated statues of the Château Grimaldi dripped with wet, and there was a sound absent in the flat blue days of summer, the continual rustle beneath the ramparts of the small surf. All along the Cote the summer restaurants were closed, but lights shone in Flix au Port, and one Peugot of the latest model stood in the parking-rank. The bare masts of the abandoned yachts stuck up like toothpicks and the last plane in the winter service dropped, in a flicker of green, red and yellow lights, like Christmas tree baubles, towards the airport in Nice. This was the Antibes I always enjoyed, and I was disappointed to find I was not alone in the restaurant as I was most nights in the week.”

Grahame Greene lived in a small apartment, Les Residences des Fleurs, on the Rue Pasteur overlooking the port, and one of his few gripes with Antibes was the noise that came from The Yacht Bar directly below his apartment- a complaint that many Antibes residents before and since can identify with!

You can find a small plaque on the apartment block, which seems somehow understated, for a man who was a true literary great. He left Antibes for Switzerland in his last few years of life, where he died of leukaemia at the age of 82.

But that is probably where the two royals parted company, for King Leopold is considered by history as a cruel and repulsive man with a penchant for young girls, and fingernails so long that he refused to even shake hands. His prudish English cousin would not have been amused, although she did meet with him on occasion during her sojourns in the South.

For many people, the glittering darkness behind the glamour is one of the most intriguing things about the French Riviera- a history of hedonism and ill-gotten gains in grand villas under the Mediterranean sun. If you like your Riviera celebrity history dark and brutal, then King Leopold of Belgium is a splendid place to start.

King Leopold is most famous for his reign of terror in the Free State of Congo, which he started as a private venture under the pretext of improving the lives of the native people. In reality he exploited the country for vast fortunes of ivory and rubber, using local slave labour. Murderous patrols of the mercenary Force Publique were sent to cut the hands and genitals off villagers when they failed to meet their crop targets. Estimates of those Congolese that died under his ‘reign’ number between 3 and 15 million, through torture, overwork, starvation and disease.

Like so many since, Leopold took the spoils and invested in property on the French Riviera. Over several years from 1899, he bought up much of the stunning Cap Ferrat, constructing and redesigning immense villas and palaces. He moored his yacht Clementine off the shores, where oligarch and tycoons now anchor their vast superyachts in the summertime. Initially the local farmers who owned the land were astonished that anyone would pay for this rocky land along the cliffs- useless for crops and mainly left to the roaming shepherds and their flocks. No doubt they felt pleased at the windfall, but the locals were not happy for long- a journalist soon wrote in the Nice paper that ‘at this rate the whole of Cap Ferrat will soon belong to King Leopold and there will be nothing more to do except put up a sign at the entrance saying “Belgian colony – Keep Out”’.

Leopold was married to Queen Marie-Henriette in a reportedly loveless marriage. After fathering four children they lived very separate lives and he entertained himself with many other females. It is alleged that English virgins as young as 10 were his flavour at the time, although at 65 years old he swapped them for a 16 year old prostitute by the name of Blanche Delacroix. Because he was still married, he secreted her away in one of his villas on the Cap Ferrat, safe from prying eyes. It is said that he would walk each night with a lantern from his palace along the path to her villa, his long beard wrapped up in a rubber envelope to stop the night-time dew sinking in and making his young lover’s skin uncomfortable when they embraced.

Much to the consternation of the Belgian people, he gave Blanche Delacroix, a commoner of ill-repute, the title of Baroness de Vaughan. Despite her new royalty, she was not allowed to leave the Villa Radiana, and stayed in her glorious cage with her view upon the sparkling sea. Leopold was controlling like that: despite his own moral weaknesses, he jailed one of his daughters for having an affair, refused a widowed daughter to marry again and broke up the impending marriage of a third.

It seems that he loved his young prostitute-turned-Baroness, for they stayed together until his death 10 years later, marrying in a secret ceremony just 4 days before he died. The two children she had were almost certainly his, and as one of the richest men in Europe he left them a vast fortune upon his death. Unfortunately for her, the marriage ceremony was declared null and void and Leopold’s immense wealth passed to his legitimate children and to the Belgian state.

King Leopold’s legacy in the Congo may not bear thinking about, but his legacy on Cap Ferrat is one of beautiful villas and gardens. The palace Villa Leopolda has since been rebuilt but the stunning Villa Les Cedres with its exotic gardens remains. As for Villa Radiana, from the sea it looks much the same as when Baroness Blanche once stood each night and waited for her Leopold- murderer, thief, lover and king- to come calling.

You can’t help but wonder what she must have thought of it all.

Indeed he was, for just under 15 months. At the time, the acceptance from the local inhabitants was less enthusiastic than what you see today. It was they who assembled a petition to ask for his confinement to the asylum in St. Rémy. Granted, he behaved like a madman, chasing after his friend Gauguin with a razor, then cutting off his own ear and presenting it to a local prostitute. At the same time, he did have a close relationship with the family of Roulin (the postman) and later the young doctor Rey. His time in Arles ended when he voluntarily entered the mental hospital in St. Rémy.

Despite the turbulences, van Gogh's stay in Arles produced a prolific and important output of his work: 185 paintings and 125 drawings. To many, van Gogh's most important work stems from this period.

Today, his works are spread out over the world, in museums and private collections. None of which you will find in Arles. You can visit the Fondation Vincent van Gogh-Arles, a museum dedicated to the painter through tributes from other artists - David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Karel Appel and more - or have a drink at the recreated Café Terrace on the Place du Forum or buy a t-shirt, emblazoned with the gypsies caravan. But an original van Gogh you will not find.

Is Arles to blame for ignoring this great master at the time? Of course not. So did everyone else, except for people such as the postman and the doctor, and, of course, Vincent's brother Theo.

Huxley was born into a famous family. His grandfather was ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, a controversial biologist who assisted Darwin in coming up with the theory of evolution, while his mother was from a family of writers and educators well known in the latter years of the 19th century.

A young man of obvious academic potential, the young Huxley was studying at prestigious boys’ school Eton when he contracted an eye disease which rendered him largely blind in one eye. This ailment would dash his later attempts to join the military to fight in the Great War, an intervention for which the world of literature must be profoundly grateful.

After graduating with a first class BA degree from Oxford, Huxley went on to work for a short time as a French teacher at Eton, although by all reports he was terrible at it and struggled with maintaining discipline. During the war he worked for some time as a farm labourer to assist the war effort, where he met his first wife, Maria, a Belgian refugee, whom he would move to the south of France with several years later.

Upon arriving on the Cote d’Azur they stayed at the fashionable Hotel Beau Rivage in Bandol, soon moving to the Villa Huley in the small village Sanary-sur-Mer near Toulon. They spent the next seven years in ‘Villa Huxley’ as it came to be known, living a life of contentment. Huxley wrote of this place, ‘Here, all is exquisitely lovely. Sun, roses, fruit, warmth. We bathe and bask’.

He wrote Brave New World in a short 4 months, and this creative time in the Mediterranean sun would also see the publication of Eyeless in Gaza and many other works which consolidated his reputation as a formidable essayist and a novelist of dazzling intellect.

The couple drove along the Cote d’Azur in a red Bugatti, socialising with their writer friends who also flocked to the Riviera during the 1930’s, including Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connelly, and poor doomed Katherine Mansfield. No less doomed, of course, was Huxley’s great friend and literary giant, DH Lawrence, who would fall victim to consumption and die in a house near Grasse.

And this is where it gets interesting.

The Huxleys were at Lawrence’s bedside when he died, and by his graveside when he was buried. Upon hearing 5 years later that Lawrence’s adulterous wife Freida had exhumed and cremated the remains and was intending to charge tourists money to visit his shrine, the Huxleys vowed to steal Lawrence’s ashes and scatter them to the desert winds. To which Freida threatened that she would put her late husband’s ashes in a cement mixer if they tried. And they say romance is dead.

Remarkably, nobody knows what happened to the ashes, although it seems they were either left in a train station, put in the cement mixer or poured over the side of an ocean liner by Freida’s Italian lover.

Regardless, it seems fitting that two men so famous for their imaginations were involved in such a dramatic plot.

The couple then moved to America, which he reportedly loved for its vitality and extravagant generosity, but deplored for its lack of conversation. While he was working as a scriptwriter in California, he used his generous salary to get refugees away from Hitler’s Germany. His wife Maria died in 1955; Huxley married again a year later to the writer Laura Archera.

Huxley became a strong proponent for the use of LSD, claiming that it allowed an escape from the body. When he was dying of laryngeal cancer, he asked his wife to administer a fatal dose, which she did on November 22, 1963, the same day that JFK was assassinated.

Just as JFK has left a lasting legacy, so too has Huxley, whose warnings of the risk to human freedom posed by technology and government seems more prescient by the day.

Brave New World seems increasingly quoted as the years go by and the modern world grapples with the very challenges to liberty and social order that technology and government pose in our brave new world.

In 1928 he bought a villa on Cap Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat which had previously housed the Belgian King’s confessor- no doubt a busy man given the nature of King Leopold’s many moral transgressions. The run-down Moorish villa was called La Mauresque, and it was soon transformed into a beautiful cool-white mansion of courtyards, galleries and vaulted ceilings, while in the gardens there were fruit trees, lush lawns and swimming pools, where the male guests could often be found swanning around naked.

An invitation to visit Somerset Maughaum’s mansion on the Cap was considered quite the coup by Riviera high society, and a steady stream of luminaries came to visit, including Picasso, Harpo Marx, Neil Coward, Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, T.S Eliot, H.G Wells and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

One must wonder in part why they were so keen to visit, for the feted author was well-known for his satirical, acerbic and thinly -veiled autobiographical works, which skewered his acquaintances and the locals in the places he visited. Certainly not all his guests were impressed with their host, with Noel Coward calling him ‘The Lizard of Oz’ and Virginia Woolf likened him to ‘a dead man’. He was far from universally liked, but still they came.

Maugham very famously judged the Riviera to be ‘a sunny place for shady people’, and while most of his works were set in far-flung parts of the dying British empire, he did reserve some of his literary flair-and barbs- for those he knew and lived amongst, such as in his satirical books, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor’s Edge.

He wrote on high society and falls from grace, grasping social climbers and the temptations of the flesh. His books detailed the foolishness and corruptions of the rich and the grasping and pretentions of the aspiring classes. He had plenty of examples of debauchery and degradation on the Cote d’Azur to use as material (as no doubt he would today).

The Nazis invasion of Paris in 1940 forced his rapid and undignified departure from France with just one suitcase. At the age of 66, he took hasty passage on a coal steamer crammed with 500 other refugees, of which 7 died on the 20 day trip to England through malnourishment and thirst.

After passing the rest of the war in South Carolina, America, he returned to his beloved villa in France, which had been looted by the German and Italian troops and extensively damaged by the Royal Navy as they shelled Cap Ferrat in an attempt to destroy the lighthouse. In fact, when he moved back in, he found an unexploded bomb resting on his bedroom floor, and said the villa ‘looking like a patient who has barely survived a deadly disease.’ He restored his dear patient to grand health and spent many more years at La Mauresque, finally dying in his bed in 1965 at the age of 91, looking out across the Mediterranean Sea.

While the villa has been rebuilt several times over, you can still see the mark of this fascinating man on the iron gates, the Moorish hand of Fatima to ward off the evil eye-the symbol that also appears on many of his first edition books.

It’s hard to imagine anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know the story of what the press quite painfully, if pragmatically, call ‘Brangelina’, but in case you are that rock-dwelling person, here’s a quick summary. Brad Pitt, movie star, met Angelina Jolie, movie star, on the set of the quite silly and not at all critically acclaimed movie ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ in 2005. The movie was about two married assassins who didn’t know the other was an assassin, and while the plot was utterly daft and unbelievable, the sexual chemistry between the couple was most believable indeed.

The fly in the ointment? Only everyone’s favourite ‘girl next door’, Jennifer Aniston, star of sitcom Friends and Brad Pitt’s wife of five years. That marriage ended very (very) soon after, and although Angelina maintains there was no impropriety, fans of Jennifer Aniston still have very firm views on the topic even a decade on.

The rumours about Jolie and Pitt circulated wildly for a short time, before they were photographed together on holiday in Kenya with Angelina’s new adopted child from Cambodia. At which point the rumour mills went permanently crazy for the couple and the press started calling them ‘Brangelina’, for which the only possible excuse is saving valuable print space.

I’ve never had any desire to work for Hello! so I’m going to stop with the celebrity gossip there and move onto the couple’s history on the Riviera.

In 2008, the couple began renting the glorious Chateau Miraval Estate near Brignol in Provence, with the intention to buy and eventually turn it into their principal home. The actors’ twins, Knox and Vivienne, were born in Fondation Lenval hospital in Nice in the summer of that year.

The house, reportedly bought for $60 million, has 35 bedrooms, billiard rooms, banquet hall, indoor pool and gym, sauna and a Jacuzzi- as well as furniture designed by Brad Pitt himself. The grounds are simply spectacular, with terraces of olive groves, aqueducts, fountains and streams running all through the wooded property and filling the moat and lake. The famous vineyard is considered one of France’s 500 best; the couple are continuing this viticulture tradition and the vineyard is turning out an excellent rose wine called Côtes de Provence Rosé Miraval, which has won numerous awards. Apparently (by his own account) Brad Pitt, superstar, has turned into quite the farmer and wine geek.

The house has a long history, with a building on the grounds since pre-Roman times, and was owned in the 1970’s by jazz pianist and composer Jacques Loussier, who built a recording studio there. Pink Floyd recorded part of The Wall album here, and Sting, the Cranberries and Sade also recorded in the studio.

And history this house continues to make: On August 23, 2014, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt wed in the French-gothic chapel at Château Miraval in a small private wedding. The couple later split in February 2017.

One can only imagine the price this wonderful property would fetch now if it came back onto market. It even has a moat.

More recently he has become involved in the wine business, opening up Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, in the United States and in 2017 he purchased Château Margüi near Barjols in Provence.

George Lucas's film career started when he was a student at the University of Southern California. Whilst there he produced several films, the most notable of which "THX-1138: 4EB (Electronic Labyinth)" won him first prize at a student film festival in 1968. After meeting and collaborating with Francis Ford Coppola, on American Graffiti in 1973 he won the Golden Globe and five Academy Award nominations, which set his career off to a great start.

Shortly after he started writing and putting together the Star Wars films, the first of which was released in 1977. This was followed by two more films and at the same time, he established subsidiary companies Industrial Light & Magic and Sprocket Systems, for sound editing and special effects. Lucas also revolutionised cinemas with the T.H.X. System, which was created to maintain the highest quality standards in motion picture viewing.

Whilst still working on Star Wars, Lucas then went on to work on a new adventure films series with Steven Spielberg, Indiana Jones, another set of huge successes. Then, reverting back to Star Wars, he started to release the three prequel movies, the latest of which was released in 2005.

He set up the George Lucas Educational Foundation, which helps improve children's education standards through project and team-based learning.

Born in the north of France, Matisse first came to Nice in 1917 to convalese after he developed bronchitis. By the time Matisse moved to the Riviera, his painting style had developed from Fauvism to neoclassism and orientalist odalisque styling. During the 1930's, his style became more simple and bolder, and he accepted many international comissions.

He rented a flat to use as his studio at 105 Quai des Etats-Unis, where he painted dozens of famous pieces - Self-portrait, Interior in Nice, and the mural, Dance II. Many of his works from this time feature the sights of Nice - The Bay of Nice, Mont Alban & Plage a Nice Vue du Chateau. Matisse struck up a friendship with Renoir who was living in Cagnes sur Mer at the time, and the artists shared their experiences of painting in the light of the Mediterranean.

During the 2nd World War, Matisse moved to Vence to escape the bombing and ended up staying for five years. It was here that he decorated the Rosary Chapel as a favour to the nun, Sister Jacques Marie. He referred to this work as a masterpiece that was the result of his entire life's enterprise, where he felt that visitors could 'be purified and relieved of their burdens'.

The Matisse Museum in Cimiez holds many of the artists work, particulary from the time when he lived here, plus an exhibition of some of his personal items. When Matisse died in 1954, he was buried in the Cemetery of Cimiez.

He is one of the Riviera’s most famous resident musicians- and wildly successful, with a personal fortune of around 700 million. Born Paul David Hewson in Dublin on 10 May 1960, he met the members of U2 and his wife at school- and both have stood the test of time. The band was formed in 1976 and has not looked back, while his wife Alison Hewson reportedly still considers herself very lucky indeed to be ‘Mrs Bono’.

In Eze-sur-Mer, he and his U2 bandmate The Edge bought a distinctive sea-front coral mansion at the reported price of 3.3 million euro. The four storey villa has a private beach (bien sur!) and was also the scene for the Electrical Storm video.

If you catch the train line from Nice, you will pass the back of the mansion on your way to Monaco- the train line passes right behind the villa as the train rattles along beside the glittering sea. Eze is a popular spot for the famous; Julian Lennon has a villa there, while Walt Disney and Fredrich Nietzsche have also walked the cobbled streets- in fact the steep climb from the beach up to Eze village proper is named Chemin de Nietzsche.

There is often a cluster of paparazzi hanging around the gates to the U2 mansion in summertime, and no wonder, for Brad and Angelina stayed here during her pregnancy in 2008, and other famous visitors include Robert de Niro, George Clooney, Cindy Crawford, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Queen Rania of Jordan.

While well-known for his charity work, Bono is not averse to spending his money- his 140ft superyacht Cyan is rumoured to have cost around 15 million euro- and you can charter this rock star yacht too, if you have a spare 200 0000 per week (and no, that doesn’t cover food. Or fuel. Or tips.)

So when the press attention gets too much, he can just hop on his yacht and head out to the glittering sea- of course there’s a grand piano on board if he gets the urge to play a tune.