Fotografi a Villefranche-sur-Mer e Cap-Ferrat

Villefranche is ten minutes east of Nice and looks like the Riviera before the Riviera got expensive: a horseshoe bay so deep that navies anchored in it, and a town of ochre, apricot and rose facades tipped down toward the water. The waterfront is the obvious session — the Quai de l'Amiral Courbet and the Port de la Santé, where fishing boats sit under six storeys of shuttered colour and the light comes across the bay from the east all morning. Behind it the old town is a stack of stepped lanes, and one of them is the Rue Obscure: a vaulted thirteenth-century passage running under the houses, dark, cool and about as unusual a backdrop as this coast has. Above the port the sixteenth-century citadel gives the wide view back over the roofs. The other half of the location is Cap-Ferrat, the wooded peninsula that closes the bay to the south. The Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild sits at its narrowest point with nine themed gardens and a pink Belle Époque loggia between two bays, and the coastal footpath rounds the whole cape past Paloma beach to the Pointe Saint-Hospice, where the sea is on three sides and the town of Beaulieu closes the frame. Practical notes: the villa and its gardens are ticketed and set their own rules for professional shoots, so check before promising that frame; cruise-ship tenders land on the quay in season and the waterfront fills for an hour or two around them; and the coast path is narrow, uneven and unshaded, so plan it for early morning rather than the middle of a July afternoon.