Monte-Carlo, le tour historique

Monaco is very badly visited alone, for a reason you only grasp once there: the city is vertical. Between the Rock and the Casino square lie less than a kilometre as the crow flies and a hundred metres of height, public lifts nobody finds, and passages that save thirty minutes' walk to those who know them. So a good guide first saves you time. Then he tells you the one story that explains everything else: how a ruined principality, having lost Menton and Roquebrune and with them most of its income, decided around 1860 to open a gaming house on a deserted plateau called Les Spélugues, and how that gamble built the city in front of you. We start on the Rock in the morning, before the heat and before the groups, and finish in Monte-Carlo. We walk where walking is worth it and take the car where the climb adds nothing, the sort of judgement a local guide makes without thinking.