After The Salt of Origins, Laurent Cypria continues his poetic journey through Mediterranean landscapes. In this second piece from his collection Crossing Shores: From the Côte d’Azur to the Riviera, he takes us on an inner journey through the streets and light of Nice, a city of contrasts and echoes.
Here, blue is not merely a color but memory, flesh, and vibration. Nice becomes a porous space, where every detail—a cobblestone, the wind, the sea, or a glance—brings forth distant echoes, between Anse-Mitan and the Promenade des Anglais, between exile and belonging.
This text is a quiet song, an invitation to the world to listen, a meditation on what connects us: light, water, and the fleeting beauty of the places we inhabit.
Nice, the fundamental blue is a meaningful stop along the way, one more step on this journey between two seas, two silences, two humanities.
Nice, the fundamental blue
Nice unfolds before me like an ancient light, softened by salt and memory. It’s a blue city—not just the garish blue of the Tordo chairs, but a sensual blue that breathes through the warm stones, the half-closed shutters, and the trams, languid as Rasta caterpillars. I arrived here by crossing an invisible border: with a flutter of my inner wings, in search of resonance.
The cobblestones of Nice feel like a piece of lotcho placed under your tongue. They’re rough, they catch on the sole of your shoe, and they remind me of the coconut bars my father used to let cool on a well-oiled tile. Here, young women never so much as glance at you; they walk by indifferently, like someone on a mouse hunt. Everything is different, and yet something stirs within me—something familiar, almost maternal. Is it the wind laden with sea spray, or this network of alleyways where, sometimes, you can still hear the lilting accent of Genoa or Tunis? I don’t know.
The Promenade des Anglais strikes me as a parenthesis of the Azure. A chaise longue stretched out along the seashore, where human weariness is etched in sandals, stroller wheels, and silver canes. I walk on, and with every step comes an emotion, a fragment of wandering, a silenced word. I then realize that the Anse-Mitan promenade, so dear to my late mother, was nothing more than a haiku compared to a Homeric poem.
The people of Nice, for their part, seem to pass through the light without paying it any mind. They’re woven into it. I watch them the way one observes fuchsia-pink fish beneath a clear surface: they jostle one another only twice a year; the rest of the time, each has enough room for their own eccentricity. In a dark corner of the old town, a socca vendor at the corner of the market hands me a steaming slice with a half-absent smile. Maybe he knows I’m not from around here. Maybe he doesn’t care.
Right now, I’m not looking to belong. I’ve come to listen. And Nice offers me a chorus of many voices—those of the seagulls, the bicycles, memories of exile, and the heyday of the English and the Russians. There’s a sense of nostalgia for the Roman Empire in the air here, a richness I haven’t felt anywhere else, not even in Paris. The twilight takes on the hue of rosé wine, sealed by the moon.
I sat down in the shade of an olive tree covered in dots. Before me lay the sea. Always the sea. Present, impassive, stretched like a rope between my origins and my present. It does not judge. It connects.
To me, Nice isn’t a city. It’s a painter’s palette. An Impressionist vision that breaks through reality. A place where the ego gently dissolves, allowing one to listen more deeply and receive more fully.
And I already know that I want to immerse my gaze in it completely. Not to search for gold. But to hear it again. That blue. That fundamental blue.
Laurent CYPRIA – President of the Martinique Ambassador Club
