A side trip to Greece

Well, almost. Today we decided to take the train to Beaulieu sur Mer to re-discover the Villa Kerylos. We hadn’t been for a few years, and we decided today was a fine a day as any.

I must have Anthea on my mind again today, she's half Greek and I think she & Don should celebrate by building a Villa Kerylos of their own.

The villa was built between 1902 and 1906 for Theodore Reinach. Reinach was one of 3 sons of a prominent Frankfurt banking family. Widowed when he was only 29, he remarried and had six children with his 2^nd wife. Theodore was infatuated with Greek antiquity, and had the villa built as an authentic replica of those from ancient Greece. He then commissioned one of-a-kind furniture, all exact reproductions of the originals (and all of which are now antiques themselves!). He even had the dining room furnished not with chairs, but reclining beds, as the Greeks never ate sitting upright. Although the home was only the summer residence for the family, while there, they lived in the style of ancient Greece, all the while entertaining the likes of Isadora Duncan (Watch out for that scarf!) King Leopold of Belgium and King Gustav of Sweden. Oh, and his cousin by marriage was the Baroness Euphrassi de Rothschild, who lived just across the bay on Cap Ferrat. To visit the web site for the villa, click here.

In an interesting twist of fate - for those who read my blog from last October in Paris – one of Theodore’s sons married the only daughter of the man who built the Nissim de Camondo mansion in Paris (one of the finest town houses I have ever been in in my life), and tragically, Theodore’s son & daughter-in-law were annihilated during the holocaust. To know more about the house, click here.

Theodore passed away in 1926. He left the house to the Republic of France, but the surviving members of the family continued to live in the Villa until 1967.

While in Beaulieu, we stopped by a restaurant that had a prix-fix menu of 220 Euros PER PERSON (Over $300 per person CAD). I took a photo of the menu if you want to see it... But we just weren't that hungry, so we we stopped into a local haunt and had a pasta lunch. The bowls of pasta were family-sized (no one knows what eating light means here) and much more reasonably priced.

It was another stunning day in the Riviera today, Sunny and windy, with a high of 25C.