End of Winter Musings: Cold Nice

A series of warm sunny days and it feels as though the year is struggling towards the warmth.   My year seems divided into hoping for a hot summer and hoping for a cold winter, which is why perhaps I am constantly surprised by my own pleasure in autumn and especially spring.

In March 2005 we spent a few days in a thawing Nice.  The streets were narrow and cold and sharply, crisply, divided between bright sunshine and dense shadow.  The hotels on the way up to the Villa Matisse and the Musee Chagall seemed half empty and the streets seemed full of real Nicois; walking babies, exercising dogs in a tiny gravel park reminiscent of one of the more densely packed areas of Paris.  In the old town the sunlight was thin on the facades, a soft uncertain light picking up on the faded pinks and blues.  The churches were cold and smelled of old incense; the ice cream stall was doing a half-hearted trade, but down on the shingle there were American girls sunbathing.   We made the most of our few days and went out to Vence and St Paul de Vence to see Chagall's grave and Matisse's chapel.  In these Provencal foothills it was appreciably warmer.  

These memories seem quintessentially Mediterranean to me, recalling a time of thin sunlight and cold shadow, of the land turning towards summer, of the light sparkling on the sea.