Monte-Carlo

Monte-Carlo is a casino square where fortunes change shoes, wrapped in a principality smaller than Central Park that stacks more registered wealth per meter than anywhere on Earth. Belle Époque domes, a harbor of competitive yachts, and once a year the whole tax haven becomes a racetrack whose corners every fan knows by heart. It is absurd, and it is absurdly well run.

The sensible traveller watches the ten-o'clock casino ballet — supercars delivering sneakers-forbidden hopefuls —, walks up to the Rock for the palace guard change and the old town's honest alleys, and takes the Oceanographic Museum seriously: Cousteau ran it, and the cliff-hanging building outclasses most aquariums. Sunset belongs to the port, where deckhands polish brass you could shave in.

The Guide's honesty: entering the Casino's front salons costs admission and a collared shirt — the atrium is free, the myth is the façade anyway —; coffee costs Riviera rates but the view is included: pay once, sit long; and Nice is twenty minutes by train: sleeping there is not defeat, it is arithmetic.