Riviera Towns
One coastline invented the modern idea of glamour, from Menton's lemon terraces to Capri's cliffs. The Riviera collection strings its towns like a necklace — wear a few at a time.
The Riviera was a winter destination, and everything odd about it follows from that fact.
Consumptive northern Europeans were sent south by their doctors from the 1760s, and the coast filled between November and April — Nice built the Promenade des Anglais in 1820 for exactly those patients, and the grand hotels put their best rooms facing the winter sun. Summer was the dead season: too hot, malarial in places, and abandoned by anyone who could leave. The English, Russians and Germans who wintered here went home in May.
Two Americans changed it. Gerald and Sara Murphy persuaded the Hôtel du Cap to stay open through the summer of 1923, brought their friends — Picasso, Fitzgerald, the Hemingways — and invented sunbathing as a leisure activity within a decade. The tan, until then a mark of outdoor labour, became a mark of leisure, and the coast reversed its calendar entirely.
Which is why the towns here divide the way they do. The old winter capitals are cities with hospitals, museums and a year-round population; the summer villages were fishing ports that grew a season and cannot absorb it; and the Italian stretch belongs to a different history altogether, having been a Ligurian and Neapolitan coast long before it was a resort one.
Read the collection in that light and the crowding of August stops being a nuisance and becomes the subject.