El Promenade of the English, facing the sea, has been in harmony with Nice’s famous promenade since the 19th century and is nevertheless the most luxuriously emblematic street on the Mediterranean coast.
The poet Joan Maragall, an illustrious resident of the Modernist period, chose the Promenade as a permanent choice and setting for his poetic and philosophical erudition:
One by one, like virgins in the dance,
the boats glide into the sea;
the sail opens like a wing in the sun,
and along paths only they can see
they move away, out into the sea...
Oh blue sky! Oh blue sea, deserted beach,
yellow with sun! Up close the sea sings to you,
while you await the magnificent return,
at sunset, of the first boat,
which will come out of the sea all fragrant.
- Joan Maragall “Views of the Sea”.
Joan Maragall’s inspiration, the intellectual who brought Nietzsche to the peninsula, was nurtured on the bucolic Promenade of the English, leaving us in poetry the sea of sensations lived there. At the end of his life, Joan Maragall composed “Nausicaa”, inspired by Homer’s “Odyssey”, and in honor of Goethe (MCMVIII - Caldes d'Estrac):
Fifth day of July, mid-afternoon.
Clear sky, gentle air, calm and sweet sea.
The sun shines everywhere, the birds sing,
and children’s voices are heard on the shore
and, pealing high above, the Sunday bells.
I, in memory of that little princess
who, with cool hands and a good heart, for Ulysses
opened the way of the longed-for return
(perhaps not without regret), wish to recall
Homer’s divine words, in a theatre,
to refresh my heart there in their meanders
and make the old new for me. And I owe the idea
to the greatest poet of Germany.
Thus, perhaps, in love, a builder attempts,
from the immortal beauty
of an ancient palace, to make a new dwelling
to shelter his love there forever.