Old Nice's Changing Heart

Old Nice - or Vieux-Nice in French, and "Babazouk" in the local slang - is the ancient corner of the great Riviera town famous for its Promenade des Anglais. After four decades of visiting this "heart of Nice", Lawrence Bohme - or Lorenzo as he's known in several Mediterranean places - has dreamed of "staying here long enough to learn how this jumble of teeming alleyways and crossroads came into being". And now "in the autumn" of life, he's produced this whimsically written but also well-informed book, "as it could only be, from the pen of a largely self-taught historian"."Old Nice's Changing Heart" is, therefore, the fruit of seven or eight seasons of "straggling back and forth in the honeycomb of crevices here called streets", Lawrence recounts, and also "reading everything which might shed light on this living relic and its amazing past: first, in the Middle Ages, a fishing village perched atop the castle hill, and then, in the Renaissance, forced for lack of space to rebuild itself down below, between castle and stream" - just a few steps from what became the glamorous "new Nice" of hotels and jewellery shops we all know.. Yet, Lawrence muses, "in spite of their nearness to one another, the two sides of Nice, ancient and modern, have - fortunately! - remained as distinct as if they were on different planets". Now, this first book in English devoted to unravelling "Babazouk's" origins, from Provençal county to Savoyard seaport, and then after many twists of fortune returning "like the prodigal son" to France in the 19th century, will help the curious visitor to go a step beyond what might be just a picturesque if confusing stroll in what Lawrence calls "the triangular labyrinth of Babazouk".... ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lawrence Bohme was born in London in 1942 and raised in Vancouver, Mexico City and Kingston, Jamaica. He finished school in New York's Greenwich Village and went on to study at the Universities of Madrid and the Sorbonne "but restlessly dropped out of both". After five years fending for himself as a language teacher in Rio de Janeiro, where he lived in a favela and also learned to become a leather craftsman, he sought other adventures in "Baby Doc's" Haiti where he taught cane-cutters to make leather handbags and learned to speak créole, followed "for fear of the tonton-macoutes" by the fascinating fortress-town of Cartagena on the South American shore "where I was soon relieved of everything I had". After such calamities, the author - still accompanied by his mother Joan, a painter, and her little flock of dachshunds - "sensibly" opted for a less challenging existence on the Caribbean islands of San Andrés, Grand Cayman, Sint Maarten and Saint Barth. Finally, weary of adventures, Lawrence returned to Europe in 1983 to practice a new profession, that of external translator for Unesco and, later, simultaneous interpreter."Old Nice's Changing Heart" is the latest of Lawrence's collection of "artistic and historical guides for the curious traveller", which began with his classic Granada, City of My Dreams, published in 2001. As well as his "books for the curious traveller", Lawrence is the author of My Very Long Youth, a "fast-moving memoir" in seven volumes, followed by the "somewhat more sedate sequel" Life After Mother. All of Bohme's books are richly illustrated with his own drawings and photographs "because I miss the time when not only children's books had pictures".