La Turbie

La Turbie, 600 meters above the stacked concrete of Monaco, is a medieval village with many arched passageways and steep staircases. The village’s proudest possession is the ruin of a great monument dedicated to Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus. This is the Trophée des Alpes, built by the Romans in the 6th century BC and constructed to celebrate Octavian’s vanquishing of the wild Ligurian mountain tribes who populated the Alpes Maritimes at that time, constantly threatening the Roman trade routes. The monument once sheltered a statue of Octavian, but vandalism over the centuries culminated with the building of a fortress during the war between Savoy and France, which ensured its almost complete ruin when in 1705, King Louis XIV of France ordered its partial destruction, fearing it could become a fortification used by the enemy. The Trophy was then ravaged by the local people and the stones used to build houses and the nearby church of Saint-Michel. So it remained until 1929 when an American, Edward Tuck, financed the restauration of the monument. Born in New Hampshire, Tuck, a Francophile, had been Vice Consul at the American Consulate in Paris. He was also a banker and philanthropist who founded the Tuck School of Business, also in New Hampshire. In 1889 he became an expatriate in France, and here he redesigned, as his home, the elegant Domaine de Vert-Mont outside Paris. This is now the Fondation Tuck. He died, a widow, in Monte Carlo in 1938.