When Victor Hugo wrote that everything there shines, everything blooms and everything sings, he was describing a place nobody was calling a tourist destination yet. Antibes on the Côte d'Azur, squeezed between the Alps and the Mediterranean, invented summer in the sense in which we use the word today - as a season you travel for, not a part of the year you endure.

The story begins in the nineteenth century, when wealthy people discovered the hills of Cap d'Antibes and started building villas there. In the 1920s, Juan-les-Pins with its fine sand drew Hemingway, Dos Passos, Graham Greene, Picasso and Douglas Fairbanks. That was not a holiday in today's sense - it was an entire scene relocating to one place for one season of the year.

From Nice you get there in twenty-five minutes by train. Old Antibes is narrow cobbled lanes and the Provençal market with local vegetables, cheeses and cured meats - the kind of market we call a green market back home, only with better marketing and three times the price for the same thing.

The sixteenth-century Château Grimaldi is now the Picasso Museum. Picasso came in the twenties, but returned in 1946 and turned part of the château into his studio. That period was among the most productive of his life, and the collection created there now sits in those same rooms. North of the harbour stands Fort Carré, a fortress from the same century - a reminder that this stretch of coast, before it was luxury, was a strategic point.

Cap d'Antibes is where the story becomes a different one. The peninsula to the south is today a shelter for billionaires, with pine-covered hills and villas among them. Château de la Croë was owned by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and later by the Russian magnate Roman Abramovich. The small Garoupe chapel, full of offerings from fishermen, stands on the same peninsula - two definitions of value a few hundred metres apart.

The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc hosted Scott Fitzgerald, who immortalised it in „Tender Is the Night”, along with Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich. In Juan-les-Pins a jazz festival has been held every July for decades - the music that was once the sound of private parties is now the only thing from that era still open to everyone.

For a traveller from the Balkans the bill is brutal, and Antibes itself is not the point. The point is that this coast taught the world that a place can live off the fact that people want to be where the famous people were. Everyone copied that model afterwards - from the Adriatic to the Aegean. Will any of our own places ever manage to sell its story like that, instead of selling only the square metres next to the sea?