Cote D'Azur: Inventing the French Riviera

The French Riviera, with its beaches, luxury villas and highstakes gambling, has been the world's favourite playground for more than a century, ever since a French poet gave this strip of land an indelible new name: the Cote d'Azur. Monte Carlo, Nice, Cannes, Cap d'Antibes and Saint-Tropez are synonyms for holiday pleasures both simple and refined. Queen Victoria; Coco Chanel; Picasso; Tobias Smollett; Fitzgerald, Huxley and Maugham: the great, the dubious and the eccentric of every generation have made the Cote d'Azur their own. This social history shows how a string of fishing villages came to represent fantasy and escape - a place for a dream of pleasure. Mary Blume describes the Cote d'Azur, enhanced by interviews with those who frequented the Riviera in its heyday, and with its modern players. Contemporary images and photographs bring to life a fabulous locale, to which the famous and infamous, the gifted and notorious came to live their own myths.