Cap d'Antibes / Juan-les-Pins

This is the address where the Riviera stopped being a winter coast. The grand hotels of the Mediterranean shut from May to September and the fashionable went home; the summer season began here, by the account of everyone who has written about it, in 1923. The house at the tip of the cape does not make that claim in its own history, and this register prints both accounts and chooses neither.

The cape and the bay are two different places under one roster entry, and the difference is legible in the shelves. On the cape a house can hold its shore: the park is closed, the footpath of the headland runs past rather than through, and the pool is cut into the rock. Along the bay at Juan-les-Pins the houses open onto a town, and the water in front of them is reached across public ground.

The literature came with the season and has not left it. Fitzgerald set his novel at a hotel on this cape under an invented name, and the couple who persuaded the first house to stay open through the summer are read as the models for his characters. The place was written into the world at the same moment it was opened to it.

The season runs from the middle of April to the middle of October, and the houses close for the half-year between. An address here does not exist in winter, and the register does not pretend otherwise by printing a year-round page.