Things to Do in Nice: Seafront Promenades, Baroque Old Town & Art Museums

Compact enough to cross on foot from Port Lympia to the Hotel Negresco in under an hour, Nice rewards visitors who alternate between coastal panoramas, seventeenth-century Piedmontese Baroque interiors, and twentieth-century modern art collections.

1. Walk the Promenade des Anglais and Climb Colline du Château

Start along the 7-kilometre curve of the Promenade des Anglais and Quai des États-Unis, where blue metal chaises bleues face the turquoise water and smooth grey pebbles of the Baie des Anges. At the eastern end of the bay, take the cliffside stairs or lift up the 93-metre limestone rock of Colline du Château. Once crowned by a medieval and Savoyard citadel that withstood the sieges of 1543 and 1691 before French troops captured it in 1705 and King Louis XIV ordered its demolition in 1706, the hilltop park now offers shaded pine paths, an artificial waterfall above the roofs of Vieux-Nice, and views east over the 20-hectare basin of Port Lympia.

2. Explore Vieux-Nice, Cours Saleya, and Palais Lascaris

Descend into the narrow ochre lanes of Vieux-Nice. Along the southern edge of the old quarter runs Cours Saleya, laid out as a terraced promenade in the eighteenth century and home since 22 July 1861 to the city's daily flower, fruit, and vegetable market. Just south on Rue Saint-François-de-Paule stands the Opéra de Nice: after a gas-leak fire destroyed the earlier municipal theatre during a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor on 23 March 1881, architect François Aune designed the present house with the approval of Charles Garnier, reopening on 7 February 1885 with Verdi's Aida.

In the heart of the old town on Place Rossetti, visit the Baroque Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate, built between 1650 and 1685 under architect Jean-André Guibert and consecrated in 1699, with a glazed Genoese-tiled dome and an eighteenth-century bell tower erected between 1731 and 1757. Two streets away at 15 Rue Droite stands Palais Lascaris, an aristocratic residence built in the first half of the seventeenth century for the Vintimille-Lascaris family, bought by the city in 1942, and opened as a museum in 1970. Since 2001 and 2011 it has housed France's second most important collection of historical musical instruments after the Philharmonie de Paris, exhibiting more than 500 instruments anchored by the 1901 bequest of Niçois jurist and collector Antoine Gautier (1825 to 1904).

3. Tour MAMAC, Cimiez, and the Riviera Coast

Follow the Promenade du Paillon north from Place Masséna to the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain (MAMAC) near Place Garibaldi. Opened on 21 June 1990 and designed by architects Yves Bayard and Henri Vidal as a four-towered tetrapod arch clad in white Carrara marble straddling the covered Paillon river, MAMAC spans 4,500 square metres across 10 showrooms. Its permanent collection pairs the European New Realists (including a dedicated room of around 20 works by Nice native Yves Klein, alongside Arman and César) with American Pop Art and Niki de Saint Phalle's October 2001 bequest of 170 works.

Up on the hill of Cimiez, pair the 1973 Musée National Marc-Chagall and the 1963 Musée Matisse with the Roman baths of Cemenelum, view the 1912 St Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral, and take coastal excursions to Mont Boron and Villefranche-sur-Mer or Cap-Ferrat, Èze, and Monaco.