Villefranche-sur-Mer

This guide to Villefranche-sur-Mer starts with a number: the seafloor two kilometers offshore drops past a thousand meters, deep enough to swallow a battleship. It traces how that depth turned this fishing cove into a strategic prize for two rival twentieth-century navies in turn, first Imperial Russian frigates wintering here after the Crimean War, then the United States Sixth Fleet, which made the bay its home port starting in 1948. The small oceanographic station the Russians built on the shore is still a working marine laboratory today.