The lemon capital of France — Baroque Italian-influenced palazzi on the last hill before Monaco, with the finest microclimate on the Côte d'Azur
Menton sits in the last bay of the French Riviera before the Italian border — a pastel-coloured town of Baroque Italian architecture, terraced citrus gardens on precipitous hillsides, and a microclimate so mild (sheltered from the Alps by the pre-Alps range to the north) that lemon trees and exotic plants grow here that are impossible 20km west in Nice. The lemon (Citron de Menton, an IGP since 2015) is the town's defining product — a large, smooth-skinned, fragrant lemon with a thin pith and intensely perfumed zest that is used in the local tarte au citron (considered the finest in France),…
Menton was a possession of the House of Grimaldi (Monaco) from 1346 until 1848, when the two communes of Menton and Roquebrune voted to secede from Monaco and place themselves under Sardinian protection (they joined France with Sardinia in 1860). The Victorian and Edwardian British aristocracy wintered here extensively in the late 19th century — the English Cemetery on the hillside holds the graves of English and Irish visitors who came for the winter climate and never left. The painter Jean Cocteau lived and worked in Menton from the 1950s; he designed the frescoes in the Salle des Mariages…