Promenade des Anglais
— — the long blue arc the city walks at evening.
Not only on a wall.
“Seven kilometres of seafront that curve with the Bay of Angels and end where the old town begins. Blue chairs face the water, set out in rows by the city since the 1950s. Palms run the median; the pink dome of the Hotel Negresco holds the middle distance. Walkers, cyclists, and skaters share the same wide pavement most of the day. In late afternoon the light goes warm against the white facades and the sea reads the blue Nice is known for.
Promenade des Anglais, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Promenade des Anglais runs about 7 kilometres along the Baie des Anges in Nice, the largest city on the French Riviera and capital of the Alpes-Maritimes department. The first path was laid in 1822, funded by the English winter community led by the Reverend Lewis Way, who paid local labourers to widen the seaside trail during a hard winter. It was widened, paved, and named the Promenade des Anglais by the city under the Second Empire, and has anchored Nice's seafront identity ever since.
The Belle Époque set-pieces along the promenade still hold the line: the Hotel Negresco, with its pink dome by Gustave Eiffel's studio, opened in 1913; the Palais de la Méditerranée, a 1929 Art Deco façade now wrapped around a Hyatt; the green-and-white loggia of the Opera. Behind them, Old Nice rises on the slope toward Castle Hill, a grid of ochre and apricot façades laid down under the House of Savoy. The pebble beach below the promenade is public for nearly its full length, with paid concessions interspersed.
Nice sits on a south-facing arc, which gives the promenade a long, even afternoon light unusual on the Mediterranean coast. The blue chairs, called chaises bleues, were introduced by the city in the 1950s and have been recast in the same shape ever since; they were officially registered as a city emblem in 2014. Cyclists and runners hold the wide pavement until the light tips orange against the Negresco; the bay then takes on the deep, particular blue that the painter Raoul Dufy made shorthand for Nice across the early 20th century.