wood rises abruptly on the left, to which the distant towers of Grasse and Mougin, with the mountains beyond, form a background. This hill is the Mont St Cassien, where a famous hermitage existed, and where a great popular festival is still held annually on the 23rd of July. An entrenched post was formed here under the Romans, for the defence of the Aurelian Way. On this spot was also erected a Temple of Venus surrounded with a sacred grove called the Ara Luci (hence the modern Arluc, a small town in the vicinity). In the seventh century this heathen temple was demolished by the religious of the Lérins, and a convent erected instead, which, in its turn, was destroyed by the Saracens. A chapel with an open arcaded porch now marks the spot ([Fig. 147]), which, surrounded as it is with ancient cypresses and pines, is one of the best designed structures of the kind in the district. Small open-air chapels or shrines of this description, with arcaded porches, are very common all over the Riviera, and often form very pleasing objects in the landscape, occupying, as they frequently do, somewhat prominent sites. They are almost invariably in a late Renaissance style of architecture.
Cannes is the one of the health resorts which has perhaps made the greatest progress within the last fifty years, having developed from the small fishing village which Lord Brougham found it in 1831, when he erected the first English villa, into a town of fine residences and splendid hotels extending for about four miles along the coast, and rising on the wooded hills, or nestling in the sheltered ravines which seam their flanks.
Like most of the towns on the Riviera, Cannes owed its first existence to a rocky eminence in the middle of a bay, forming at once a naturally sheltered harbour and a suitable site for a fortification for its defence ([Fig. 148]). It is therefore probably a place of very ancient origin, and was in all likelihood the primitive Ligurian settlement of Ægitna, where the Roman Consul Quintus Opimius obtained a victory over the Ligurian tribes B.C. 155. The town was then handed over to the Massiliotes, the allies of the Romans, and went by the name of Castrum
FIG. 148. BAY OF CANNES AND THE ESTERELLE MOUNTAINS.
Massiliorum during the Middle Ages. Sometime before the tenth century it became a fief of the powerful Abbey of the Lérins, to which the whole of the adjacent country had gradually become subject. The ecclesiastical suzerain was represented on the mainland by a “chevalier,” who occupied the castle of Cannes, which crowned the rock above referred to, and was surrounded with walls. On the slopes of the castle hill and round the harbour at its base were erected the houses of the ancient town, and in the same position still stand the dwellings of the native population, approached by steep and narrow alleys ([Fig. 149]).
The summit of the hill is crowned with the only buildings in Cannes having any claim to antiquity. These consist of the “Tour du Chevalier,” the ancient Church of St Anne (formerly the chapel of the castle), and the more modern parish church of the seventeenth century, the whole being surrounded with the remains of walls, towers, and bastions of various periods, enclosing open spaces and courtyards, and presenting a very varied and picturesque ensemble.
The “Tour du Chevalier” ([Fig. 150]) is a structure of peculiar interest, being the first we have met with of a series of similar towers which, we shall find as we proceed, were erected in the eleventh and twelfth centuries for the defence of the towns and churches of this district. These towers are generally, like that at Cannes, square on plan ([Fig. 151]), and have walls built with courses of square dressed stones, having the faces left rough. The ground floor is vaulted, and is entered only from the first floor by an aperture in the vault. The entrance doorway to the tower is on the first floor, at a considerable height above the ground; being so placed for security and being only approachable by a moveable ladder. The projecting step