Menton: The garden of France

A hundred years ago, travel writers commented, there was something peculiarly depressing about Menton — or Mentone as the British would say, recalling the days when the town situated on the Mediterranean border between France and Italy was an independent Italian-leaning state. It was depressing because wherever you looked there were people tottering palely along the promenade past the statue of Queen Victoria (who used to stay in a discreetly grand villa tucked among the hills) or lurking in the numerous hotels with Anglophone names. Since Dr James Bennet in the 1870s had declared that the town’s microclimate and its almost unfailingly good weather offered a hope of recovery for those suffering from lung problems, a foreign colony of the ailing had sprung up. Predominantly British but also German, Swedish, Russian, many settled in the generous villas that spread through the olive groves on the luxuriant slopes above the town’s two bays, although such commentators as Augustus Hare who had known the earlier town felt that a once-lovely place had been wrecked.