On June 20, 2019, the application of the City of Nice was presented to the National Council of “Cities and Regions of Art and History” at the Ministry of Culture in Paris. After deliberation, the National Council voted in favor of granting the City of Nice the “City of Art and History” label.
On this occasion, the Historical Heritage Department of the City of Nice is dedicating its new series of lectures to this label. These lectures are also part of the “Discover to Promote” project, funded by the Interreg Alcotra program of the European Regional Development Fund, which aims to enhance the tangible and intangible cross-border French-Italian cultural heritage.
The first lecture in the series, titled “Nice, a city, a challenge”, will be held at 3 p.m. at the MAMAC Auditorium and will be hosted by Jean-Loup Fontana, a heritage curator.
All cities have a history, and Nice is no exception to this rule. However, its history is particularly unique as nothing inherently predisposed the site to host the permanent settlement of a large population and the range of activities this entails.
Geology, hydrology, and even climatology were unfavorable to this initial development. It took all the resources of a will, political in the primary sense of the term, to assert over the centuries an urban identity strong enough to withstand external competition while integrating and adapting world developments to its project. The landscape and heritage of Nice provide evidence of this.
