Trip Report: Nice, Monte Carlo, and Marseille (2025)
This is Part 4 of my France Trip Report Series: Nice, Monte Carlo, and Marseille. Here are links to the other parts of this series:
Ah, Nice and the French Riverira (or Côte d'Azur as they call it in French). It’s hard not to just take a deep breath and feel relaxed once you arrive in Nice. Our hotel was positioned right on the coastline, which allowed us easy access to leisurely walks along the beach taking in the sun and beautiful views. We didn’t have much planned for our time in Nice other than walking around and just enjoying the city. During our initial planning we had explored taking a day trip to explore some of the surrounding cities, but we were glad at this stage of the trip to just have some downtime.
We spent our first day walking along the coast and through an outdoor market, enjoying the views and everything around us. Along our walk there was a film production that allowed me to snag a few interesting photos of the actors in a scene that looks like a window into another time. We had a light lunch on the beach, eating fresh fish, shrimp, and calamari. After lunch we visited a perfume shop and took a class on how to make our own perfumes, which was a lot of fun! Now we have our own scents that we created!
From Nice, we continued our trip to Monte Carlo where we had tickets to watch the Monte Carlo Masters tennis tournament for two days. We didn’t spend too much time exploring the city (from what we saw, it’s a lot luxury, opulence, and extravagance…lots of flexing). That said, the city and the tournament had a city bus (one of the nicest city busses we’ve ever been on) that offered an easy way to get from our hotel to the tournament. We went to our first professional tennis tournament last year at Indian Wells and were excited to be able to attend another tournament in a different country (and on clay). We got to watch Rublev v. Fils; Popryn v. Ruud; and Medvedev v. De Minaur on our first day during Round 3. On the second day, we attended the quarterfinals matches and got to see Davidovich Fokina v. Popryn; Fils v. Alcaraz; Dimitrov v. De Minaur; and one of the best matches of the day, Musetti v. Tsitsipas. Monte Carlo is close to Italy and the crowd included a very strong Italian showing, so it was so much fun to see Musetti (who was in his first ever Masters 1000 quarterfinals…against last years’ winner) get cheered through by the crowd after being down a set in a big way and fighting off 14 of 17 break points.
On our way back to Paris, we spent about 24 hours in Marseille. It was a beautiful town (although we were a little overwhelmed with the busloads of tourists around the marina when we went to get lunch). Our hotel room had a very large terrace overlooking the marina with a church on the hill in the distance that was a very beautiful spot to enjoy a glass of wine before dinner. The next day after breakfast, I went off and did a little solo walk around the marina, through a little farmers market, and through some of the side streets to Cathédrale La Major.
We then headed off to catch our train back to Paris, enjoyed a nice dinner at our hotel, and left for the airport to catch our flight home the next day! All-in-all, this was a truly incredible trip and I feel so fortunate to have been able to do it and feel inspired to start planning the next trip!
Trip Notes
Hotels: Hyatt Regency Nice Palais de la Méditerranée, Fairmont Monte Carlo, Hôtel Dieu Intercontinental Marseille
Restaurants of Note: Bocca Mar (Nice), Restaurant Chez RiTho (Italian Food in Nice), Fairmont Monte Carlo Lobby Lounge Restaurant & Bar (Monte Carlo) Les Fenetres (Marseille). Our hotel restaurants were all quite good and tended to be our go-to.
Activities: Molinard Perfume Workshop in Nice; Monte Carlo Masters Tennis Tournament
Travel Tips / Learnings:
Time of Year: Similar to the rest of the trip, we felt like late-March / early-April was such a good time to visit. The sun was out many days, but temps were not overly hot and nothing was super crowded as it likely is during the summer months.
Nice is Nice: Of the places we went on the French Riviera (and there are certainly more places we’d love to go!), we would go back to Nice in a heartbeat and would love to spend more time exploring the restaurants and the broader region.