Castle Hill Cemetery

In front of you, the tombs of the Castle Hill cemetery step down the slope, in one of the most beautiful cemeteries on the Riviera. It opened in 1783 on the site of the old citadel, after a royal decree banned burials inside churches.

1The theatre in flames

By the entrance stands a stone pyramid. It commemorates the victims of the fire at Nice's municipal theatre on 23 March 1881. A few minutes before a performance of «Lucia di Lammermoor», as the gas lamps were being lit, there was an explosion; the fire caught the woodwork and the ceiling collapsed onto the upper tiers. The figures vary between sources: the city speaks of around sixty victims; other accounts of nearly two hundred.

2The phantom's author

On these terraces lies Gaston Leroux, the journalist and novelist who published «The Phantom of the Opera» in 1910, the tale of the masked genius haunting the depths of the Paris Opera. Leroux spent his final years in Nice and died here in 1927.

That the author of opera's most famous phantom should rest a few steps from a memorial to a theatre fire is pure coincidence. But few visitors forget it.

Also buried here are the statesman Léon Gambetta, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen, Emil Jellinek, the man who gave Mercedes cars his daughter's name, and, in the Jewish section, René Goscinny, co-creator of Asterix.

3What to look for

• The pyramid in memory of the 1881 fire.
• The funerary statues: several are by Prix de Rome sculptors.
• The view over the rooftops of the Old Town.