Blue skies again

After two days of almost continuous rain, rare for here, the observatory not the usual etched white dome:



Blue skies are back:



So one feels like walking - in the old town:









It seems to have been quite an artistic area - once:



Today you can study the new media - and sports journalism has become so absurdly dominant it has its own course:





Monument to Catherine Segurane:



On Rue Segurane:

Letter from Nice

"I've tested Munich, Florence, Genoa—but nothing suits my old head like this Nice [20], minus a couple of months in Sils-Maria [1]. At all events, I am told that the summer here is more refreshing than at any place in the interior of Germany (the evenings with sea breeze, the nights cool). The air is incomparable, the strength it gives one (and also the light that fills the sky) not to be found anywhere else in Europe.

Finally I should mention that one can live here cheaply, very cheaply, and that the place is large enough in scope to permit every degree of concealment to a hermit. The altogether select things of nature, such as the forest paths on the closest hill, or on the St. Jean Peninsula, I have all to myself. Similarly the entire Promenade (about a forty-five minute walk) is splendidly free, inasmuch as people visit for only a few hours during the day. . . .

One is so 'un-German' here: I can't emphasize that strongly enough"—Letter to Heinrich Köselitz, November 24, 1885

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/452786.html

"The Good European"

"For even if I should be a bad German," the peripatetic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to his mother in 1886, "I am at all events a very good European." This heavily illustrated volume marshals considerable evidence to demonstrate just how accurate that statement was: For much of his life, Nietzsche wandered restlessly around Europe, preferring to keep his distance from a Germany he found suffocatingly oppressive and second-rate. But his wanderings were motivated by something more than flight. Philosopher Krell (DePaul Univ.) and photographer Bates argue persuasively that Nietzsche had a strong, persistent appetite for natural and man-made beauty, and that he sought out sites as different as the Alps and the Mediterranean to stimulate his creative powers. Relying heavily on excerpts from Nietzsche's letters, journals, and published works, and on the recollections of friends and colleagues, and on both period and contemporary photographs of everything from Nietzsche's various rooms and homes to street scenes in Nice, Genoa, and Turin (among the many places Nietzsche visited), the authors do make a convincing case for viewing Nietzsche as a true cosmopolitan and as a writer sensitive to a sense of place.

http://www.amazon.fr/Good-European-Nietzsches-Sites-Image/dp/0226452794/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=english-books&qid=1241038446&sr=1-3

By the port:



Back through the old town: