Matisse Museum

This guide to the Matisse Museum in Nice asks why the painter spent his final years beside a two-thousand-year-old Roman arena rather than the Belle Époque hotels that had drawn European aristocrats to this hillside since the railway arrived. It follows Matisse from his 1917 arrival chasing the Mediterranean light, through his years in the old Excelsior Regina Hotel, to the seventeenth-century villa behind you, built for a consul named Gubernatis. Queen Victoria herself once wintered down the hill from here.