Nice to Nice

Stage 1 - Saturday, 29 August - 170 km (106 mi)

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The Stage

A few loops in and around Nice and then a bunch sprint is all but certain on the lovely Promenade des Anglais. The winner here will get the Yellow Jersey so the competition will be fierce. Who is going to run away with it?

Winner: Alexander Kristoff

Tour Touristique

Promenade des Anglais
Starting in the second half of the 18th century, the English aristocracy took to spending the winter in Nice, enjoying the panorama along the coast. In 1820, when a particularly harsh winter further north brought an influx of beggars to Nice, some of the English proposed that they could work on the construction of a walkway (chemin de promenade) along the sea. It was funded by the Reverend Lewis Way and members of Holy Trinity Anglican Church.

The city of Nice, intrigued by the prospect of a pleasant promenade, greatly increased the scope of the work. The Promenade was first called the Camin deis Anglés (the English Way) by the Niçois in their native dialect. After the annexation of Nice by France in 1860 it was rechristened La Promenade des Anglais.

Garibaldi, Hero of Nice
Nice gave birth to one of the most legendary, romantic, but also historically decisive figures of the 19th century: Giuseppe Garibaldi. His aura in his day was such that some portray him as the Che Guevara of the previous century. Abraham Lincoln even considered entrusting his armies to him during the Civil War while in England, young ladies bought water taken from his bath as would the groupies of a rock star. The son of a Nice fisherman, with little interest in education, he lived an extraordinary life from his birth in 1807. Hired as a sailor in his teens, he travelled the Mediterranean and was initiated during a voyage by Saint-Simonians, a political sect advocating scientific progress and friendship between the West and the East. His liberal, republican and anti-clerical ideas came from there.

Going from navy into activism, he became associated with Mazzini, creator of the Young Italy movement and an ardent supporter of Italian unification. Garibaldi became one of the leaders of this quest, despite being born French, at a time when Nice briefly passed from Savoy to French rule. Exile took him to Latin America, where he supported the independence movements of Brazil and Uruguay. On his return to Nice, he played a key role in the struggle for the unification of Italy and the peninsula’s battles against Austria or France. Insubordinate, independent, a strong leader but a poor strategist, he achieved many feats but hardly got along with other heroes of Italian independence. Mazzini accused him of siding with royalty while Garibaldi never forgave Cavour for handing his beloved city of Nice to France in 1860. Garibaldi was not anti-French, however, far from it. He supported the men who, in 1870, proclaimed the French Republic and Léon Gambetta even offered him command of the Eastern Front. He was then elected member of Parliament but his election was invalidated by the enemies of the Republic on the grounds that the man who was born French against his will… was Italian! Tired of politics, he then retired to the islet of Caprera, and died there in 1882. "I am from Nice, so I am neither French nor Italian," he wrote, dreaming of a European Union with Nice as its capital.

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