From the top of the hill of Castello Nizza, the old Nice appears. With its colours, sunny, warm but never stuffy, the Baie des Anges offers itself intact in its luminous splendour, framed – a semicircle of 5 kilometers – by the Promenade des Anglais. The Prom has always been much more than a street or a boulevard, it is the stage of the city, teeming and sonorous, where everyone becomes the protagonist. Who walks, who chats, who jogs or bikes, who drags, who does gymnastics, who dressed and who less ready to lie down in the sun on the beach of galet or dive into the sea, because Nice is also this, one of the few places in the world in which swimming in the city center is not ridiculous. There is the port but she was good at hiding it. There is the airport, the busiest in France after Paris, with the roar of planes landing and taking off skimming the coast as an integral part of the noise of the Promenade, and he has built it so close to his famous hotels that we can arrive on foot, almost without attracting attention.
But it takes little, going down the streets that lead to the sea, to understand that this year will be a different mid-August, marked by too great a tragedy. Nice has changed inside even if outside it is making an effort to always be the same, in search of that lost joie de vivre, the most captivating asset not only of Nice but of the entire Côte d'Azur that the madness of terror swept away in a day of celebration in the dark of the evening, as soon as the fireworks have gone out. A month ago the city after a hellish night of blood she was immersed in an agonizing silence, unknown in her history. The closed and deserted beaches, the flags at half-mast, the Prom without the shadow of a car. Only ambulances and gendarmerie cars. "The carnage", headlined Nice-Matin. Since then there has hardly been a day when, like a nightmare, the huge white truck that was supposed to carry ice creams and which instead, zig-zagging, sowed death for almost two kilometres, does not come to mind. Horror scenes too fresh to even physically erase. On the Promenade, the Théatre de Verdure has become the theater of collective pain: an expanse of bouquets of flowers, candles, poignant notes full of affection, lots of soft toys and toys are there to remind adults and children who are no longer there. A little further on, on the red sidewalk, the pity of a street artist painted a gigantic "Pour nos Anges" in white and blue. And the last painful disenchantment came a few days ago with the arrest of Gwenael Leriche, the delivery boy decorated with a medal for civil valor for having risked his life having thrown himself against the assassin on that cursed evening of July 14th: he was arrested for attempting to stab his ex-partner.
A month has passed since the carnage of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel and yet in the city hospitals, from Pasteur to Lenval, that of children, there are those who struggle to survive. Others are out of danger but will forever bear the marks of a monstrosity. Inevitably, it was a summer in which quite a few shows and musical appointments were skipped, always crowded but less noisy than the others, marked by fierce controversies over the gaps in terms of security on the fateful evening of the Bastille Day. A summer in which, at a political and institutional level, reflection on the complexity of a city that has showcased the lights of the Promenade and the richest neighborhoods is unavoidable, culpably neglecting to solve the social problems of integration in difficult agglomerations such as the Ariane and Saint-Roch, in a short time become dens not only of malaise but also of jihadists and foreign fighters. An invisible threat nestled in the anonymous high-rise buildings along the Paillon, at the entrance to the Nice-Est motorway, a terrorist network that has recruited and affiliated them with followers of petty crime that has been active in the area for decades. Signs have always invited motorists to close their doors and windows to defend themselves against theft and harassment. However, no one noticed that in the neighborhood they were going from muggings to planning a horrendous attack. Now that the massacre has taken place, the alert has obviously increased in level even if no one wants to give in to terror. But it becomes difficult, wherever you are on the Côte d'Azur, not to think about what happened. A stone's throw from Nice is the splendid bay of Villefranche where the sea enters soft and inviting. Tourists galore in the clubs on the edge of the marina, lots of bikinis (and even fewer) lying in the sun, the ideal mix of champagne and sunscreen for a summer that would seem perfect if there weren't the entrance to the road bordering the beach a completely new digital panel warning: "Alerte ATTAT, soyez vigilants".
This invitation to transform us all into so many improvised Poirots in briefs makes us smile. Then the memory goes to Sousse where the jihadist attack came from the sea and for a moment one falls back into uneasiness for a terror that strikes blindly. A threat that in Cannes led the mayor to arrange for a few days ago on the Croisette, at the beginning of the pedestrian area, the installation of massive concrete planters, those that if they had been on the Promenade could have limited the massacre in Nice. A preventive action to reassure people a little but also a further sign that we live in difficult times. So difficult that someone ended up seeing almost a sinister prophecy in a painting by Henri Matisse, "La tempète de Nice" in which the artist of happy Nice, full of light and color, wanted to paint a different Promenade for once, livid and depopulated, the palm trees blown by the wind, between a black sky and threatening waves.
