Vieux Nice & the Cours Saleya Market

Vieux Nice, the old town, is the city's Italianate heart, a tight grid of tall, ochre and rose-coloured houses squeezed between Castle Hill and the sea, and it feels more Genoa than Paris — a reminder that Nice belonged to the House of Savoy and became French only in 1860. Its lanes are too narrow for cars and too shaded for the sun to reach the cobbles for most of the day; washing hangs between shutters, tiny épiceries sell olive oil and candied fruit, and every few corners a Baroque church opens up in gilt and marble: the Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate on Place Rossetti (with the city's most famous ice-cream counters in its shadow), the Chapelle de la Miséricorde, the Église du Gesù. The Palais Lascaris, a seventeenth-century aristocratic mansion with painted ceilings, now holds a collection of musical instruments. The great set piece is the Cours Saleya, a long rectangular square running parallel to the sea, lined with restaurant terraces and pastel façades — the yellow house at its eastern end is where Matisse lived and painted from 1921 to 1938. Down its middle runs the market under striped awnings. From Tuesday to Sunday, the Marché aux Fleurs fills it with cut flowers, potted plants and herbs alongside fruit and vegetable stalls, local producers selling olives, tapenade, honey and cheese, and crafts and specialty stalls; on Mondays the flowers make way for an antiques and bric-a-brac market. Nearby, on Place Saint-François, the old fish market still operates in the mornings. This is also the place to eat the city's street food: socca, the chickpea-flour pancake baked in a wood oven and eaten hot with black pepper, pissaladière with its onions and anchovies, and pan bagnat, the salade niçoise in a bun. Wandering is free; the only skill required is getting slightly lost.

When to go: the market is at its best in the morning, when stalls are fullest and the light falls down the length of the Cours; by early afternoon the produce traders pack up and the terraces take over. Arrive between eight and eleven, walk the length of the market, buy a cone of socca or a slice of pissaladière, then disappear into the lanes north of the Cours. In the evening the old town turns into Nice's main going-out district, with bars spilling into tiny squares; Place Rossetti and Place du Palais de Justice are the liveliest. Note that some terraces on the Cours Saleya itself trade on location rather than cooking — eat your market lunch from the stalls or walk a few lanes back for better value.

A short route that covers the essentials: start at Place Masséna with its red façades and checkerboard paving, walk through the Promenade du Paillon gardens, enter the old town by Rue de la Préfecture to the Palais de Justice, then down Rue Saint-François-de-Paule past the opera house and the confectioners, along the Cours Saleya, up through Place Rossetti and the cathedral, and out to Place Garibaldi with its arcades and seafood bars on the edge of the port district. That loop takes about two hours at a market pace. Watch your phone and wallet in the crowds, as in any popular old town; pickpockets work the market and the busiest lanes.

Food lovers can go deeper with a guided food walk through the old town — several operators run them, covering socca, pissaladière, local olive oil, cheese and wine from Bellet, the tiny AOC vineyard in the hills above the city. Families should know that the lanes are stroller-unfriendly in places, with steps and uneven paving, but children love the market colour and the ice cream on Place Rossetti. In winter the market runs as usual (expect citrus, winter greens and mimosa from late January), and in February the Carnival parades pass close by on Place Masséna. Combine the old town with Castle Hill directly above it: the stairs and the lift both start at its eastern edge.