Musée Picasso, Antibes

In the autumn of 1946, just after the war, Pablo Picasso was offered a studio in the Château Grimaldi, a castle on the ramparts of Antibes looking straight out to sea. He worked there from mid-September to mid-November in a burst of joy — he had a new companion, Françoise Gilot, and the Mediterranean all around him — painting fauns, centaurs, goats, sea urchins, fishermen and nymphs on whatever materials he could find in a time of shortages: plywood, fibrocement, boat paint. When he left, he gave the town the twenty-three paintings and forty-four drawings he had made, and in 1966 the castle became the first museum in the world dedicated to Picasso. The collection centres on those Antibes works, which have a light, mythological, Mediterranean mood unlike anything else in his output, including the celebrated large panel known as La Joie de vivre and a whole wall-sized painting, Les Clés d'Antibes. Alongside them are seventy-eight ceramics he made in 1947 and 1948 at the Madoura workshop in nearby Vallauris — plates, jugs and figures painted with faces, birds and bullfights — and photographs and documents from his stay. The museum also presents works by Nicolas de Staël, who spent his last months in Antibes in 1954 and 1955 and painted some of his greatest canvases there, galleries for Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, and modern sculpture on the sea terrace, including works by Germaine Richier and Joan Miró. The building itself is part of the pleasure: whitewashed rooms with deep windows, and a terrace above the ramparts with the sea on three sides. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday with a lunch break, closed Mondays; adult admission is a modest fee and under-18s enter free. As a city tradition, entry is free for all visitors during two weeks each year, including the week following the first Tuesday after 1 November.

Practicalities: the museum stands on Place Mariejol at the edge of the old town of Antibes, on the ramparts above the sea. Opening hours outside summer run from 10am to 1pm and 2pm to 6pm, Tuesday to Sunday; it is closed on Mondays and on 1 January, 1 May, 1 November and 25 December. Free entry weeks run from the first Tuesday after 1 November to the following Sunday — 3 to 8 November in 2026 — and again from the first Tuesday in February to the following Sunday. A seven-day multi-site card covers the town's municipal museums. Allow an hour to ninety minutes.

Getting there: Antibes is twenty to thirty minutes from Nice by regional train, and the old town and museum are about ten to fifteen minutes' walk from the station, through the port. Regional buses run along the coast too. With trains disrupted on strike days, check the timetable the evening before. Tiqets sells a guided Cannes and Antibes half-day tour from Nice if you prefer to be driven, though tours rarely allow time inside the museum.

Making a day of Antibes: start at the Provençal covered market on Cours Masséna (mornings), then the museum, then a walk along the ramparts to the sixteenth-century Fort Carré and Port Vauban, home to some of the largest superyachts in the Mediterranean. In the afternoon, walk or bus out along the Cap d'Antibes for the coastal path, or cross to Juan-les-Pins, the 1920s jazz-age resort with sandy beaches, for a late swim in season. Families can add the town's sandy beaches; couples should finish with an apéritif on the ramparts at sunset, looking across the bay to the snow-capped Alps behind Nice in winter.