| The origins of ST-TROPEZ are unremarkable: a little fishing village that grew up around a port founded by the Greeks of Marseille, which was destroyed by the Saracens in 739 and finally fortified in the late Middle Ages. Its sole distinction from the myriad other fishing villages along this coast was its inaccessibility. Stuck out on the southern shores of the Golfe de St-Tropez, away from the main coastal routes on a wide peninsula that never warranted real roads, St-Tropez could only easily be reached by boat. This held true as late as the 1880s, when the novelist Guy de Maupassant sailed his yacht into the port during his final high-living binge before the onset of syphilitic insanity. Soon after de Maupassant's fleeting visit, the painter and leader of the neo-Impressionists, Paul Signac, was sailing down the coast when bad weather forced him to moor in St-Tropez. He instantly decided to build a house there, to which he invited his friends. Matisse was one of the first to accept, with Bonnard, Marquet, Dufy, Dérain, Vlaminck, Seurat and Van Dongen following suit, and by the eve of World War I St-Tropez was pretty well established as a hangout for bohemians. The 1930s saw a new influx of artists, this time of writers as much as painters: Cocteau, Colette and Anaïs Nin, whose journal records "girls riding bare-breasted in the back of open cars". In 1956 Roger Vadim arrived to film Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu Créa la Femme. The international cult of Tropezian sun, sex and celebrities took off – even the 1960s hippies who flocked to the revamped Mediterranean Mecca of liberation managed to look glamorous – and the resort has been big-money mainstream ever since.
Pages in section ‘St-Tropez’: The Town, Information, The beaches, Restaurants, Nightlife.
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