Four days in Nice: French since 1860 and still cooking Italian

Whatever time you arrive, go up the hill at the eastern end of the seafront first. There has been no castle on it since Louis XIV had the fortress pulled down in 1706, so what is up there now is a park with waterfalls, pine trees and a viewing platform where the keep used to be. It is the view every photograph of Nice is taken from, and it closes at sunset, so the last hour of daylight is both the best and the last chance.

There are stairs from the old town and a free lift beside the sea at the bottom of the eastern end. Take the lift up and the stairs down.

Then walk into the old town underneath it and eat something in the street before dinner. This is a compact grid of alleys, six storeys high and three metres wide, and it does not open up until the evening.

Cimiez is where Nice started, on the hill fifteen minutes north of the centre by bus. The Romans built their town up here, the city forgot about it for a millennium, and in the nineteenth century it became the smart address where Queen Victoria wintered. Today it holds the two museums that make Nice worth a detour.

Do Chagall first, because it is smaller and lower down the hill, and because it is worth arriving before the coaches. The building was purpose-built for one cycle of paintings on Old Testament subjects, which the artist gave to the state, and he had a hand in the design: the concert hall has his stained glass in it.

Then walk twenty minutes further up to Matisse, whose museum occupies a red seventeenth century mansion among the olive trees. He lived in Nice for the last thirty odd years of his life and is buried in the cemetery next door. The collection follows him from the early dark paintings to the paper cut-outs at the end, which is a useful way to see it.

The Roman ruins are directly below the villa in the same park, and free to walk around.

Take the train, not the bus. Twenty five minutes from Nice-Ville, the line runs mostly in tunnel and drops you inside the rock at a station that has an escalator to the port. Monaco is two square kilometres and you will walk all of it.

Start on the old town side, up on the promontory. It is a medieval hill town on top of a cliff, pedestrian throughout, with the palace at one end and the aquarium at the other. The changing of the guard happens outside the palace at five to twelve, takes about ten minutes, and draws a crowd worth arriving ahead of.

The aquarium is the reason to come even if you think you are not interested. It was built into the cliff face in 1910, Jacques Cousteau ran it for thirty years, and the tanks below the museum floor are still among the best presentations of Mediterranean marine life anywhere.

In the late afternoon, walk around the harbour to Monte Carlo. The casino will let you in as a sightseer in the morning for a modest fee, and as a gambler in the evening for rather more, with a passport and a jacket. Either way the gaming rooms are the point: stained glass, gilt and a great deal of nineteenth century money.

A last morning at sea level. The Cours Saleya market runs down the seaward edge of the old town and is flowers and produce every morning except Monday, when it turns into a large and genuinely good antiques market instead. Go early: it packs up around lunchtime.

Then the modern art museum, ten minutes north at the top of the old town, which is four square towers linked by glass walkways. The collection runs from Yves Klein, who was born in Nice, through Warhol and the French new realists, and takes about an hour. The roof terraces are open, and they are the second best vantage point in Nice after the castle hill.

Lunch by the market, then twenty minutes on the tram to the airport.