Riviera Palace
If walls could whisper, the Riviera Palace, the Cote d’Azur’s grande dame of the Belle Epoque, would have a whale of a tale to tell.
 To see the Riviera Palace is to be beguiled by it. The Beausoleil Tourist Office has organised for the Journees Europeennes du Patrimoine on Saturday 18th September, a couple of mini-bus tours, which will include points of interest in Beausoleil. Timings: 9-11 am or 2-4 pm. Reservations are necessary and may be made by telephoning + 33 (0)4 93 78 01 55. (photo courtesy of the Archives of Beausoleil and La Gazette de Monaco.)
As the 19th Century blossomed into the 20th, the hotel became the chicest hostelry on the Rivie ra. Celebrities (when celebrity was generated by talent rather than publicists) and Europe’s crowned and uncrowned heads flocked with their entourages to the hill-top venue in Monte-Carlo Superieur.
Winston Churchill was such a catch he was able to visit the magnificent Palace as a guest of guests. Wilhelm Apollinaris Kostrowitzy, better known as Apollinaire, the writer who introduced cubism into literature, was another ‘guest’ of friends well aware the poet’s mother had liquidated the aristocratic family’s fortunes on the gaming tables of Europe. Colette was inspired to write passages of her novels there. The legendary Ballets Russes’s Diaghilev and Nijinsky visited, before the autocratic Diaghilev dismissed the sublime dancer for marrying without his consent. Stravinsky convalesced from typhus at the Palace, visited by the only artist unafraid of contagion, Ravel. The Shah of Persia, Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, the Imperial Family of Russia and Leopold II of Belgium all succumbed to the Riviera Palace’s allure.
The Palace’s attributes were considerable: her location, 150 metres above sea-level guaranteed a salubrious climate, tranquillity and a panorama that looked down, East to West, from Bordighera to Cap Ferrat. Those seeking leisure and pleasure found everything they might desire inside the hotel: a restaurant, grill room, tea room, bridge room, an orchestra-in-residence, library, reading room, common room, a fifth-floor pergola/ promenade and an international staff of 1,000 to cater for every whimsical self-indulgence money might buy. For evasion from paradise, there was a private railway, La Cremaillere, which took guests to down to Monte-Carlo’s Casino and Salle Garnier theatre.
Hidden behind the rhythmic 136-metre façade of bow windows and balconies was an exotic affectation imported from Britain, a winter garden, lush with succulent plants and exotic flora. The more than 900 square-meters of the Riviera Palace’s glass garden was covered by a 27-metre-high, metal-veined cupola.
Lavish life-styles of the Belle Epoque were jolted into a reality of a different kind when the assassination of an Austrian arch duke in Sarajevo buckled the fragile balance of imperial power in Europe and triggered the Great War. The grand dame gave up her 150 rooms to a new set guests: poilus replaced the hoi poloi.
As many as 250 wounded combatants arrived in a single day at the new military hospital in Monte-Carlo Superieur where Prince Albert I spent time at the bedside of each soldier. To accommodate the growing number of victims of war, the Riviera Palace’s roof top promenade was restructured into hospital wards. By the early 1930s, the glamorous grand dame looked fated for destruction, until she was rescued by an Italian entrepreneur and turned into apartments.
In 2003, the interior, including the frescoes and winter garden, was refurbished and artisans were found to reproduce the original detailing, right down to the gold leaf decorating the stair spindles and the dolphin heads adorning drain pipes. Only the exterior of what is a national monument remains to be renovated. Nonetheless, the Palace, now under the jurisdiction of Beausoleil, a community that didn’t exist when the Palace was begun in 1898, has lost none of its legendary charm. An American artist, a resident of the Palace for a number of years, was overheard to declare, “I would scrub floors to be here.”
Text Lois Bolton.
Photo © Gillian Johnson-Flint. |
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me Minister in 1955, and wishing to retire to the Cote d’Azur, he tried to purchase from the Société des Bains de Mer his ‘dream villa’ La Vigie (next to the Monte Carlo Beach ), which, in recent years, has been occupied by fashion designer, Karl Lagerfeld. Churchill’s last Riviera visit was in 1963, aged 87, to stay again at the Hotel de Paris before embarking Aristotle Onassis’ yacht Christina for a cruise to Sardinia, Corfu and Athens. He died in London on 24 January 1965, aged 90.