Cimiez: Two Thousand Years on One Hill

Arènes de Cimiez

The Roman amphitheatre of Cemenelum, built around 75 AD, seated 4,000 spectators for gladiatorial games on this hilltop above Nice.

You are standing inside a Roman amphitheatre that has never been buried. Unlike most ruins in France, these stones have always stayed above ground. Builders cut them between 70 and 80 AD, when Cemenelum was capital of the Roman province Alpes Maritimae. The arena is modest: 68 meters long, 57 wide, one of the smallest in Gaul.

But it held 4,000 people, and the crowd came for gladiatorial combat. Look at the ring of sockets near the top of the outer wall. Those held the wooden masts that supported the velum, a canvas canopy that shaded the spectators. In 258 AD, according to tradition, a Christian named Pontius faced the beasts here.

The animals refused to attack him, and he was beheaded down by the Paillon river. His name survives in the Saint-Pons district below. The arena fell quiet after the fourth century, but it never disappeared. Until 2011, the Nice Jazz Festival filled these stones with music every summer.

Walk the full ellipse before you go. The south entrance was the Porta Triumphalis, the gate through which the opening parade entered.

Thermes romains de Cimiez

Three Roman bath complexes, a paved street, and an early Christian cathedral lie exposed on the site of ancient Cemenelum, capital of the Alpes Maritimae.

You have just stepped from the arena into the daily life of a Roman provincial capital. Cemenelum spread over at least 20 hectares, and this open-air site preserves its bath quarter. Three separate bathhouses served the city. The North baths are the largest: the frigidarium wall still rises ten meters above you, and for centuries locals called it the Temple of Apollo, because no one remembered it was a cold room.

The standard Roman bathing routine ran through the frigidarium, the warm tepidarium, the dry laconicum, and the hot caldaria. Look at the East baths for the hypocaust, the underfloor heating system of terracotta pillars that carried hot air from a central furnace. Two aqueducts, one from Falicon and one from Mouraille, fed the baths. Walk the decumanus, the paved east-west Roman street.

At the West baths, something remarkable happened: in the fifth century, the frigidarium became the choir of an early Christian cathedral, and a hexagonal baptismal pool was built over the old furnace. The city of Cemenelum was reinventing itself.

Musée Matisse

Matisse's personal collection fills a 17th-century Genoese villa set among centuries-old olive trees, steps from the Roman arena.

The villa facing you was built in 1695 by the Gubernatis family, who served as consuls of Nice. Its pink ochre façade and trompe-l'œil decoration are pure Genoese style. For two centuries it was a country house surrounded by olive groves and Roman ruins. The city bought it in 1950 and renamed it the Villa des Arènes.

When Henri Matisse died in 1954, his heirs donated a large body of his work to Nice, and the museum opened here in 1963. Matisse had lived just up the road at the Hôtel Regina since 1938, working in a combined apartment on the third floor. The collection traces his entire career: from the early Fauve canvases to the late cut-outs, when scissors had become his primary tool. The museum holds the largest Matisse collection in France.

Before you go inside, walk around the forecourt. The black stabile-mobile by Alexander Calder is a deliberate counterpoint to the villa's classical lines. The olive grove around you is more than a century old. Matisse looked out on these same trees from his apartment window.