Monastère de Cimiez

This guide to the Monastère de Cimiez in Nice rewinds from the cypress trees at its cemetery through two thousand years of the hill beneath them: a Roman city of thousands, the Benedictine monks who followed, and the Franciscan friars who arrived in 1546 and planted the rose gardens still standing today. It traces the monastery's turn as a Revolutionary-era barracks and hospital, and the wave of aristocratic winter visitors, Queen Victoria among them, who later filled the grand hotel up the road. Listen for how one painter's habit of watching the light from that same hotel window brought him back to this hillside for good.