On the right trail

Is this the Riviera’s new culture capital? Steven King makes the case for walking the Principality’s open-air sculpture trail

- Steven King

In 1987, Prince Rainier III, widower of Princess Grace and father of the current monarch Prince Albert II, launched a biennial open-air sculpture fair in the streets, parks and public spaces of Monaco. It included specially commissioned pieces, as well as others from his personal collection—and it was a smash. Indeed, it was so successful that he decided to leave all of the sculptures in situ and to continue adding new ones with each subsequent edition of the fair. Eventually, more than 200 pieces were on permanent display across the principality. In 2023, they became collectively known as the Chemin des Sculptures Rainier III. As with the NC500 in Scotland, something that was already there—in the case of the NC500, a network of public roads—was given a catchy name and thus made freshly exciting to visitors.

A website offers maps and information on every piece and you can scan QR codes on or near each sculpture, which will open the relevant page. Organising a visit to Monaco around the Chemin des Sculptures—or simply taking an hour or two to take a quick look at it if you're there for other reasons—almost guarantees you'll see things you either haven't seen before or wouldn't see otherwise.

The trail can be undertaken casually, partially and with no regard for sequence. Hop on, hop off. It does make a certain sense, however, to start with Kees Verkaade's 1997 sculpture of François Grimaldi, the founder of the Grimaldi dynasty, who in 1257 seized Le Rocher, the Rock of Monaco, disguised as a monk. More than 700 years later, a Grimaldi is still calling the shots from the ancient palace in front of which stands this sculpture of a frankly rather slippery-looking, if not downright Machiavellian, François.