Here on the riviera a lot of effort is put into decorating towns at Christmas time and ensuring there is plenty going on to cheer up the darkest weeks of the year. Councils spend a lot of money on illuminations and entertainments. There are also various Christmas markets and funfairs. I'd like to show you some of the festive colour from the three largest settlements: Nice in France, Sanremo in Italy and Monte Carlo in Monaco. I'll provide my own commentary to photos and short film clips here, which you can click to enlarge or play, but you decide for yourselves what is most attractive according to your own tastes. Feel free to comment, and any descriptive vocabulary, from "wonderful" and "beautiful" to "tacky" and "naff", is entirely acceptable. These entertainments are all public and all free so I usually give feedback to the local authorities who are using our tax dollars euros to create them.
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| Piazza Borea d'Olmo, Sanremo, Italy, after the mayor switched on the lights. |
Nice, capital of the riviera
Nice has a typically long, straight, wide shopping boulevard, Avenue Jean Médecin, culminating in a vast city square, Place Masséna, which has public parks on either side. The avenue has every other tree decorated in white fairy lights and, coupled with shops' and bars' own window displays, looks both pretty and grand.
The square contains the Fountain of the Sun (Fontaine du Soleil), with a huge statue of the sun god, unshamedly naked. Also unashamed is the vast animatronic anthropomorphic animal advert for French ski resorts that surrounds it. Ha! the winter olympics are in Italy and presumably French resorts risk losing money, is the cynic's retort here! But we are no cynics, are we? (cyniques? nous? parbleu!) and we quite enjoy the display with its flocked trees and happy skiing bears (bears do ski, don't they?)
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| Place Masséna with Christmas tree illuminations. The illuminated kneeling statues on poles are a permanent art installation. |
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| Place Masséna with flocked Christmas trees and lit up ferris wheel. Only in Nice can you be mooned by the sun! We wish you a botty Christmas! |
Rabbits kissing in the snow. I'm not sure this sort of thing should be encouraged: just one rabbit kiss and, before you know it, you're knee-deep in bunnies!
The neighbouring Jardins Albert Ier (Albert I [of Monaco] Gardens), however, have some illuminated winter-themed sculptures surrounded by water, all for free. Polar bears, reindeer, elves, penguins, presents, trees, lanterns ...
By day ...
By night ...
The surrounding water is only a centimetre deep which makes it safe and creates a mirror effect.
This is the offering at the south west end of the Alps and I was keen to see it so as to compare it to Violetta's description on her lovely blog of a similar display called Lumagica in Innsbruck, Austria, at the eastern end of the Alps (link to Violetta's post: Hofgarten - Lumagica).
On the other side of the square is the ferris wheel that operates all year, and under it is a Christmas market and funfair. The market, like the sculptures, is free to get in but with security "comme à l'aéroport," as the security guy said to me... and he wasn't wrong. (They're very security conscious here in Nice after the 2016 Bastille Day attack when a terrorist drove a truck into hundreds of promenaders.)
The market is pretty and kids can meet Santa (for a fee) but the prices are silly. Everything in Nice is up to twice the price of stuff across the border in Italy, which is precisely why I live on that side of the border and not this one!
Sanremo, City of Music
I went to the switching-on ceremony in Sanremo, which was well-attended by families and, this being the City of Music, began with a long musical preamble in one of the central squares with music of several genres from pop to gospel, with an orchestra concert nearby. The light projections in the square and the illuminated Christmas sculptures that you can walk into were fun. Certainly magical for children who loved being part of the display.
The main illuminations are not just for the Christmas season but are intended to last through to the end of the huge Sanremo Music Festival at the end of February 2026, so the high street is festooned with lights right down its length.
The Festival is housed mainly in the massive Ariston Theatre that takes up the best part of a city block and was built in the 1970s so the theatre's neon signs are of funky Seventies stars and their funky hairdos. Groovy, man!
The highlight of the entertainment, though, had to be the trio of dancing jellyfish. Yes, you read that right. To various catchy Christmas hits, a troupe of four-metre (twelve-foot) high jellyfish pranced about the town entertaining (and endangering) the crowds.
Watch for yourselves:
All together With Mariah Carey now: "All I want for Christmas is ...plankton."
Sanremo has a large funfair by the beach and an ice rink in the main square where the town's actual live pine tree is fully illuminated, with various other sculptures.
I'm pleased to see that illuminated decorations go right down the coast road through town for many miles. The also decorated the ugly concrete security blocks (to prevent a Nice copycat attack) to look like Christmas gifts, which is pleasing.
Monaco and Monte Carlo
Monaco has a lot of money and they don't stint on big displays. The old town on the rock (Le Rocher) is more traditional in its offerings. The palace has a line of Christmas trees outside between the cannons, all decked out in red.
It was fun to watch the daily changing of the guard with the festive tree backdrop.
With music if you prefer...
Down below at the main harbour, Port Hercule, there is a Christmas funfair and market, and a skating rink on what is normally the outdoor pool.
The funfair is better than the ones in Nice and Sanremo, being much more family friendly with good rides and better stuff for kids. And the market wins hands down over the one in Nice since the prices are entirely acceptable. I got some spiced tea for Christmas in preference to that from my usual outlet in Italy, and I also found the kind of unusual rings I've been looking for for some years and bought one that I really like ... more on that in another post.
The ice rink is certainly unique. Where else can you skate surrounded by fancy yachts and belle époque architecture?
The main Christmas decorations are in Monte Carlo, though, outside the Casino and the Café de Paris, and in the neighbouring Boulingrin Gardens. These are altogether on a different scale with a huge decorated Christmas tree, many smaller decorated trees and shrubs, and half a dozen huge glass balls containing tableaux of goofy animatronic reindeer doing various Christmassy things. See for yourselves ...
So here are just some of the lights, decorations and entertainments on the riviera this winter. There's a whole lot to be said another time about Christmas nativity scenes, which are a big tradition along this whole coast. In fact, villages and parishes can get quite competitive about it as the local crib is often a tribute to local craftsmanship and local pride, especially when a model of the locality stands in for Bethlehem. From the vast nativity scene with 300 statues that takes up half a hillside at Manarola to this tiny one carved in a wine cork that formed part of the crib displays around the palace at Monaco, it's something that's very much part of the winter festivities in this whole area.
There's a lot to be said about winter flower displays, too, as flowers bloom all year in the mild climate. I'll stop here, though, as I have Christmas preparations to get on with. But I'll be posting again before Christmas. Good luck with your own preparations.
Sue x
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