Your Cote d’Azur Time Machine

1. The gargoyle at Giusti Garden in Verona www.messynessychic.com/2025/05/14/13-things-i-found-on-the-internet-today-vol-739

An unlikely superhero spy; a bookish art historian in a paisley print dress, posing rather meekly beside her inventory of valuable museum works. But behind the innocent smile and the matronly garb, Rose Antonia Maria Valland was a lone female agent of espionage who, during WW2, tirelessly and valiantly put her life on the line for the love of art, saving scores of looted works of art during Nazi occupation. She is the subject of a new book The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland by Michelle Young, who will be the special guest author for our July salon of the Paris Writers and Readers Club (July 17th). In the meantime, we caught up with Michelle during her publication week for a behind-the-scenes look at Rose Valland’s Paris, including some of her old haunts.

I grew up spending summers in a little country village in the south of France where nothing ever really happened. To romanticise those hot, sleepy days, I spent many hours devouring movies in the evening; seductive dramas and romantic comedies that played out in the Mediterranean

In the summer of 1923, an American husband and wife could be credited with two rather surprising things. Their name is seldom remembered in the context of the glamorous 1920s, but the French Riviera became the summer destination it is today thanks to the infectious expatriate couple known as the Murphys. Gerald and Sarah convinced their circle of friends to summer with them in Cap d’Antibes at a time when the fashionable only wintered there, leaving the region abandoned during the high summer months. Their pals included a young Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau and a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation who fell into the couple’s orbit.

As it turns out, the French Riviera caters to more than a few of our favourite holiday past-times: channeling Brigitte Bardot, building sand castles at the beach and ... tracking down aliens? About an hour north of the seaside city of Nice, into the mountainous terrain where Provence meets the Cote d’Azur.

In the Spring of 1971, Keith Richards began renting a villa on the Côte d'Azur. The Rolling Stones were tax exiles from England and shacked up at Villa Nellcôte, a 16-room mansion of the Belle Epoque that had previously been occupied by the local Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s. French photographer Dominique Tarlé documented the six month-long “house party” that ensued; a summer of sex, drugs and most certainly, rock and roll…

There was definitely something about Renée. When the legendary French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue met her while strolling the streets of Paris in 1930, he fell in love instantly. Tall, chic and hiding coquettishly under a wide elegant hat, he nicknamed her the 'parasol'.

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