French Riviera 1920s & 1930s

The French Riviera is a twentieth century phenomenon, going from rural poverty to the heights of luxury through the century, roughly in parallel with the growth of the movie business. During the 1920s and 30s the Cote d'Azur, the strip of Mediterranean coastline that stretches 100 miles from the port of Toulon to the Italian border, was the fashionable meeting place for high society. At the same time, an architecture developed that was both thoroughly modern in its embrace of the healing power of sunshine, and neoclassical in its fascination with the splendor of ornament.