Nice is Nizza

This summer my family when on a Eurotrip. Our final destination was Nice on the French Riviera. I hade never been before, and when we arrived I started feeling more and more like we were not in France. I mean that this city had a different history. Just like say Strasbourg feels a lot more German than your average French city. And then when I learned that our closest square was called Place Garibaldi my suspicion grew larger.

So I ended up spending the daily buss rides between Place Garibalid and Cap Ferrat reading the very informative English Wikipedia article on Giuseppe Garibaldi and I learned a tone of Italian history that I was totally uninformed about.

But back to Nice, or Nizza, Garibaldi was born there. It was culturally clearly closer to the regions that later became part of the unified Italy, than with France. But by a peace deal in 1860, the city became French. Much to Garibaldi and many other Italian nationalists disappointment and frustration.

In general I find if very interesting to observe how much European culture manifesting itself as a continuum. Going from Kiel on the north shore of Germany down to Nice is a great way of seeing this. The region around Kiel feels and looks very Danish.

Any way I highly recommend reading up on Gariabaldi, “the only wholly admirable figure in modern history” according to Wikipedia.