My trip to Nice 

by Fergus FitzGerald

My mother, my aunt Eleanor and I went to Nice on the 25th of June 2014. It was my third time in France. Nice is in the south of France. It is in Cote d’Azur. Cote d’Azur means a blue coast in French. In English we normally call it French Riviera.

We stayed at Mary and Michael Furlong’s apartment, and Valerie from Canada looked after us. We explored Nice which is on The Mediterranean Sea.

Once when Eleanor Ashe and I explored it I saw at Hotel Suisse a plaque in French which commemorates the fact that James Joyce commenced Finnegan’s Wake there in October 1922. Eleanor and I also visited Chagall’s art museum and enjoyed it.

The next day my mother, Eleanor and I travelled from Nice on a train across the border between France and Italy to Ventimiglia. Ventimiglia means twenty miles in Italian. We took another train from there to Genoa for only a night. Genoa is in Liguria. It is in the north of Italy. It is the largest port in Italy. It is the capital and largest city of Liguria.

It is very beautiful but it is not as exciting as I thought.

It is Columbus’s native city.

It is Mazzini’s native city and he founded Young Italy.

It is also where Garibaldi led the Redshirts from across Italy to Sicily for a unified Italy. Before it was a country Italy was only the Italian Peninsula but not the islands it would one day rule.

We stayed at Metropole Hotel for a night and explored Genoa. We saw ‘my fountain’. (I once did art at KCAT on a Genoese fountain); and we explored the great port of Genoa.

The Romans called Genoa Genua in Latin. In Italian it is called Genova and in French Genes (pr. Zhen).

Genoa is Paganini’s native city. He was a composer and a violinist. He had to teach himself the violin as he was much better than his teachers!

We went back to Nice the same way in the opposite direction. We enjoyed it there for a few more days before we had to go home. We flew home to Dublin from Nice on the last day of June. We all enjoyed our holiday a lot. We have agreed that once was enough for us to go to Italy for one night only.