Monte Carlo

Monte-Carlo is where the real money is flung about, and its famous casino demands to be seen on an MSC Mediterranean cruise excursion. Adjoining it is the gaudy opera house, and around the palm-tree-lined place du Casino are more casinos, palace-hotels and grands cafés.

The American Bar of the Hôtel de Paris is the place for the elite to meet, while the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hermitage has a beautiful Gustave Eiffel iron-and-glass dome.

The Villa Sauber is one of the few surviving belle époque villas in the principality, set amid concrete apartment blocks. It comprises one half of the Nouveau Musée National, and presents interesting temporary art exhibitions, often on Monaco-related themes. MSC Mediterranean cruises also offer excursions to the old town of Monaco-Ville which has been spared the developers’ worst.

On place du Palais you can watch the changing of the guard or see the tombs of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace in the nineteenth-century cathedral. One of Monaco’s MSC best excursion is the beautiful fortified village of St-Paul-de-Vence. It’s a village squeezed onto a hilltop just 2 miles (3km) south of Vence towards Cagnes.

While the village itself is a delight, and is usually crammed with visitors throughout the summer, its popularity owes as much to the Fondation Maeght, a wonderful museum of modern art and sculpture tucked into the woods nearby, as it does to its medieval core. You can’t miss its most famous landmark, right outside the walls on the only approach road – the Colombe d’Or, a hotel-restaurant that’s celebrated for the art on its walls, donated in lieu of payment for meals by the then-impoverished Braque, Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard in the lean years following World War I.