french riviera antique & secondhand shops

i just liked the sound of that and figured it was a good time to stop by.

hi all, i hope you’re having a ball this june weekend. i spent the morning at the ocean and got my groove back. now i’m home, focused on researching my upcoming job in nice. i want to nail down our itinerary toute de suite. like today cause the trip is June 21. i’ll post what turns up!

french-riviera-antique-and-secondhand-shops

grasseantiques.com

i just had to post a couple cute pics that jumped out first thing. this antique store is in grasse, apparently an ancient perfume-making town that inspired the book ‘perfume‘…

but i digress. first thing is getting the lay of the land. the region is officially called Provence-Alps-Côte D’Azur.

there are regions within regions. we’re looking at the 06 (although below it’s called by another name, guess it’s a french thing)

it’s such a dense country with so many villages, towns and history! this could take a lifetime to explore.

this may be sort of dull if you’re not going this year but if you ever decide to, hopefully this can be a reference. i want to get out of nice and up into the less traveled areas but there’s so much front and center!

in all today’s research the most obvious data is that the people of southern france, like parisians, enjoy a good brocante, vide grenier and their antique foires.  call it what you will, they’ve been buying, selling and trading the same gems for 200 years.

googling around i stumbled on an article that gave a little backstory on the area:

‘As Gastou tells it, the mid-sixties, was the golden age of the French antiques business. “In those days a merchant could still buy, at one stroke, the entire contents of a château,” he recalls. “As a kid I was dazzled by getting into so many places and seeing such valuable things. In 1968 French priests lost the right to dispose of works of art, but before then provincial curés were permitted to sell them for certain purposes—to repair a church, for instance. Old charitable institutions and hospices, some dating back to Louis XIV, were emptying their attics and cellars.

The best antiques, like major pieces in the Louis styles, went to Paris—or perhaps to America—by the trainload. The next-best material went to the antiques dealers on the Côte d’Azur’.  hmmmmm, so that’s a good sign…

departures.com-all-about-yves

anyway i have about a million notes and links to go through. i have a friend in nice who offered to take us around and all the girls (vicki, mel and corey) are on board too. whew!

well i hope you get some sunshine in these next few hours and enjoy the rest of your weekend! more soon~