Once the Riviera's answer to Atlantic City, Nice is being reborn as a kind of Miami on the Mediterranean, replete with hip hotels and a resurgent restaurant scene. Adam Platt takes the temperature of an enclave whose transcendent light drew Matisse and Picasso, and whose haute French style and earthy Italian soul are again très chic

Shortly after my arrival in the sun-drenched city of Nice, after stowing my bags in the clean, matchbox-sized room of my very hip, almost alarmingly modern boutique hotel, after wandering the famous promenade rimming the Baie des Anges, after buying an ice-cream cone in a jet-lagged haze, and after admiring the blue deck chairs laid out in their long rows on the pebbly beach, I attended a small cocktail party given by an expatriate friend in her apartment four blocks from the sea. There were other expats in the room: a painter from Amsterdam, a former theatrical producer, an English gentleman named Mr. Fortune, who wore a blue blazer with gold buttons and made his living brokering the sale of multimillion-dollar yachts to fat cats cruising up and down the Riviera. It was cherry season in Provence, and someone had brought a bag back from a farm in the country. People were drinking Champagne and glasses of icy rosé and, aside from eating cherries, were doing what people who live in Nice often seem to do, which is talk about the horrors of their more self-consciously stylish neighbors, Monaco and Cannes. Monaco, they said, was for dim-witted aristocrats, humorless tax accountants, and the excessively rich. "It's a postage stamp," declared the yacht broker, who happened to work there. "People go to Monaco to visit their banks." Cannes, on the other hand, was a tedious ghost town in winter, and in the summertime it was overrun with traffic and crowds of pretentious Speedo-clad poseurs. "I have a Cannes aversion," declared the yacht broker's wife. "They have a sandy beach, but the sand is all trucked in. I like the rocky beach in Nice. You don't get sand in your suntan oil, and you can have a man bring you a bottle of Champagne for fifty euros; in Cannes, it will cost you a hundred."

There were other benefits to Nice, although they were hesitant to divulge them for fear I'd spoil their little secret. After all, for centuries the city's character had been set, more or less, in stone. It was the Atlantic City of the Riviera, a destination for package tourists and pensioners, a stolid, conventional place where successive generations of elderly foreigners—first Englishmen, then Russians and Italians—went to sip their cheap Provençal wines, bask in the golden sunshine, and die. In all of his evocative writings about the Riviera, F. Scott Fitzgerald barely mentions Nice. Paul Theroux, who spent a night there on a tour of the Mediterranean, commented sourly on the unsanitary condition of the streets—it's famously a city of widows who walk their dogs three times a day. Modern Parisians consider Nice a tourist trap and the Niçois shady, indolent, and hopelessly Italian. When Americans think of Nice, it's usually as the gateway to more glamorous destinations such as Aix-en-Provence and St-Tropez: It's the place to go in the south of France when you want to get somewhere else.