Cote d'Azur main page

What will become of the cote, nature and Cap Ferrat?

A superb road winds very close to the coast along the afforested peninsula Cap Ferrat. You can walk all around the peninsula passing first the fisher village Saint-Jean, now a summer and winter stay with a yacht harbour. A few old houses are left around the small harbour and church. The wedding hall of town hall is decorated by Jean Cocteau who adored the place. Ask for the “route pedestre” along the seaside and you’re gone for one of the most exciting walks you ever did. 

..
Jack on tour around Cap Ferrat	Mrs Jack on tour around Cap Ferrat

If you do the complete tour (including the most eastern point ‘Pointe de Saint-Hospice”) you must count half a day easy (leisurely walk). Don’t get lost inside the peninsula, you will wind up walking on asphalt roads and that’s no fun.
But for the art and garden–lovers, the great attraction of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat is the absolute incredible MUSEE EPHRUSSI-DE-ROTSCHILD. This museum is housed in a dream villa, pink and white, used to be called "Villa Ile-de-France", that the baroness Béatrice Ephrussi de Rotshild gave to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1934.

Villa Ephrussi

The Villa started in fact between 1905 and 1912. Béatrice de Rothshild was not only a Rothshild, but also married with a very wealthy Russian-Jewish banker and wheat trader. She lived in an enormous villa in Monaco but got bored. Yes, that’s what happens when you have too much money! Let’s be happy we haven’t;-). Visiting Cap Ferrat, her eagle eye fell on a property of 7 hectares in the “throat” of the peninsula, also spotted by the king of Belgium, Leopold II. Both offered, Béatrice won. For seven long years twenty to forty architects worked on the building of a pseudo-Renaissance villa, surrounded by a sumptuous park of 7 hectares divided into seven gardens (Florentine, Spanish, exotic, lapidary....which means with statues and sculptures not being able to be housed inside the villa), it is a unique site, from where wonderful panoramic views on the sea are splendid. Architects suffered a great deal with this eccentric woman. She was not easily satisfied and used up to 40 architects!  The ceilings were specifically designed around her Tiepolos!!

Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild

What Béatrice considered and executed at the outside was nothing compared to what she perpetrated inside! She recreated her happy childhood, which she spent, as all the members of the Rothshild clan, in the chateau de Ferriéres. Béatrice grew up in that chateau (east of Paris) amidst the most valuable that art had to offer. On the walls she could admire every day paintings of Gainsborough and Van Dijck, from Ingres to Frans Hals. This chateau belongs now to the Paris university and I figure it must be painful for the Rothshilds that the chateau de Ferriéres is now just next to Disneyland!
Money was no problem for Béatrice and soon whole trains loaded with valuable paintings and sculptures traced by art experts all over Europe arrived at the station of Beaulieu, where the baroness made a choice and sent the rest back. You can read in the folder you should receive at the entrance that she bought the ruins of a chapel just to use a fresco in her villa. Notice that today young hostesses with a very " fashion model" look give an aspect of "salon de mode Parisien" to this cultural space.
For the proper visit inside and the gardens, I will continue in my next article.

Bibliography:  

John Pemble, "the Mediterranean Passion, Victorians and Edwardians in the South", (Oxford University Press 1988), Mary Blume, "Cote d'Azur. Inventing the French Riviera" (Thames and Hudson, London 1982) Stephen Liegeard, "La Cote d'Azur (Ed.Serre, Nice 1988),  Patrick Howarth, “When the Riviera was ours” (Century, London 1977).

Cap Ferrat contents

Cap Ferrat-Villa Ephrussi de Rothshild-a visit inside and
outside