Today we spent the morning in Nice before our pick up to start our Italian “tour” in Pieve di Teco – using the ” because we are the only members of the tour group!

So Nice was nice but don’t feel the need to return – but travelling from NZ on Qatar it allows for a direct flight from Doha and has good transport links within France and into Italy without the hassle of an enormous airport to transit through so I’d think about it as an entry point again.

We spent Monday, a public holiday, seeing the sights of Nice including the Port, Colline du Chateau, the Promenade des Anglais and the old Ville. We had lunch in one of those iconic beachside bars come private beaches and saw some “interesting” public art.

Tuesday we took the train to Grasse, about an hour away, to do a perfume making workshop at Molinard, one of the perfume houses based there. The train passed through Cannes and Antibes and gave us a good view of the coast – and some of the very large and expensive super yachts which are a feature here. The workshop was fun, but we didn’t really get to see Grasse as Molinard wasn’t really near the centre at all.

Today we visited the small but interesting Matisse Museum in Nice, and then explored the park, Franciscan monastery, gardens and cemetery around it. The cemetery has the graves of Henri Matisse and Raoul Dufy, many of the great, the good and the monied of Nice, as well as having some nice views!

So tonight we are in the village of Pieve di Teco, near Imperia, in northern Italy. And more about that tomorrow!