Imagine starting your day by going out into the sunshine of the garden, picking a dozen oranges cooled from the night air off a tree and then bringing them indoors to juice them for breakfast. That was my daily ritual in February on the Cote d'Azur, or the French Riviera. It's a micro-climate of benevolent warmth, a stretch of coastline hemmed between the Mediterranean Sea and the Maritime Alps that mimics a much more southerly climate. It's very built up, there's almost continual villas from St. Tropez in the west to Monaco in the east, each vying for the position that gets the most of the sun, especially in the winter.

I was here for a week with the lads, a week set aside for wining and dining with a little sight-seeing thrown in as well. We were staying near Nice, so Cannes and Monte Carlo were within easy reach on either side. Our first non-eating excursion was to Monaco late one night. The casino in Monte Carlo is a thing of wonder to behold. It's at right angles to the Hotel de Paris and between these two buildings you have the apotheosis of the Belle Époque. Marble steps lead up to the casino and just outside these steps you can see some of the world's most expensive motor cars lined up. Anything less than a top of the range BMW would look out of place here. Inside at reception you pull out your passport for identification and you decide whether you want the plain ordinary €10 entrance, or the €20 entrance to the salon prive. Apart from needing a passport you also need a tie and if you don't bring one they can even provide you with one, although for some reason I was admitted tieless, perhaps because of the collarless shirt.

Anyway, once inside you have to breathe deeply to take it in. Did you see Walt Disney's 'Beauty and the Beast'? Remember the ballroom where Beauty first dances with the Beast? It's impossibly huge with a ceiling that must be fifty feet high. Well the anteroom in Monte Carlo's casino is like that. It's very, very big. People are milling around it, some making an attempt at Gallic suavity, some looking distinctly iffy. You could almost call this room grand, except that it seems so much the product of a design brief that said something like 'I want a palace, something grandiose, something lofty, something like a Hollywood set-designer's idea of what a classy ballroom would look like.' And that's what you get here. Still, we had tickets for the salon prive and weren't about to hang around with the riffraff and their petty bets.

In the salon prive you step into similarly sized rooms, but the house limits have changed. Now instead of a maximum bet of €100, you're into €100 minimum bets on blackjack and roulette. There's no doubt that the boys have been separated from the men here. The mood's different, you can almost smell the sweat of fear and adrenaline. The roulette tables have three croupiers, one on each side and one at one end while a pit boss sits on a high chair at the other end monitoring all bets and transactions between the cash boxes and the chips. Look up and you can just make out the CCTV cameras that are watching the pit-bosses watching the croupiers watching the punters. And the blondes watching the punters. 'They're friendly girls from Russia,' explained Paul, 'they watch the tables and if anyone makes a big win they become even more friendly.'

Neither Paul nor I were keen to actually place any bets. We share the same view about casinos; viz, something has to pay for all those pretty chandeliers and bulky security guards and that something is you and me. The only thing keeping this majestic ship afloat in its blaze of chandeliers is the zero on the roulette wheel. Still Dee was determined to give it a go and decided that the most favourable odds were to be had at the vingt-et-un table. At €100 a pop you could go through your money quickly enough here, so when he turned around to ask 'are you guys bored?' we noticed he was winning and said we were. It was thankfully remarkably easy to part him from the table, so we ushered our friend, who was now €300 to the good, to the bar where he could buy us all a coupe de champagne with his winnings. Sadly with champagne at these prices, there wasn't enough money left over to make the friendly girls even a tad chummy. When he cashed in his chips it was the first time I'd seen a €500 note, the preferred currency unit of drug runners, arms dealers and high-stake gamblers.

In truth there isn't a lot that's beautiful in Monaco. It's very high rise to accommodate all those rich Monegasques in less than two square kilometers, but elegance in architecture doesn't seem to have been part of the plan. Still, there are good things to be seen, and I'm not thinking only of Michael Smurfit's villa. Down at the waterfront there's a line of Rivas moored. If you haven't seen a Riva before, this is a treat indeed. Built in Italy during the fifties and sixties, the Riva speedboat is a thing of immense beauty. Made of polished mahogany, elegantly styled, powered by Ferrari engines, these boats are the ultimate Riviera babe magnet. You could buy one for around €250,000 if you're lucky, but you'd also have to put aside €20,000 a year to maintain the precious thing and you'd spend most of your days in a worry that it might get a scratch. To purists, Rivas stopped being Rivas when they moved to fibreglass hulls. Which brings me to the Starfish Nice.

The thing about Harry is that he walks. He's capable of six miles a day and he doesn't just walk for the fun of it - he keeps his eyes open. Harry looks over walls, checks out cul-de-sacs and foot paths, in short he notices things. He'd have made a great private eye, he always seems to know what's for sale or what's just been sold, he never stops observing. This is the same characteristic that led us to the boat. The French have immensely long and complicated rules governing probate and it's not unusual for probate to take years. That's what happened with the boat Starfish Nice. The owner, a Parisian boot-maker of distinction, had died some ten years earlier and the boat remained in the capable hands of Monsieur Delfino who kept it in his boat yard until probate was cleared and it could be sold. Harry heard about it and off we went to find it.

M. Delfino's boatyard is miles from the sea on the road to Dignes from Nice. It's packed with boats of all sorts; some he repairs, some he sells and some he builds. The ones he builds, the pointus, are the traditional smacks of Provencal fishermen. Originally clinker built, the new ones are fibreglass and topped off in wood. But we've come to see the Starfish, which is a 1970s Riva motor cruiser with an unfashionable fibreglass hull. It's in a shed looking remarkably well preserved for its age, its seventies curves reminiscent of those pleasure boating ads in Playboy all those years ago. We admired the lettering on the stern, heavy chrome letters screwed on individually reading 'Starfish Nice'. To read this properly you have to say 'Starfish', pause, then drop your voice an octave and then say 'Niiice.' You could also be pedantic and say 'neece' after its city of registration. After a bit of the nautical equivalent of tyre kicking we set off for Nice and an afternoon drink.

The seafront, the Promenade des Anglais, takes its name from the early 1900s when the English discovered the gentle winters of the French Riviera and began to invade it. We sauntered along some its length before entering the Negresco, a hotel of extraordinary architecture and interior decoration. A big pink dome with an excrescence on top that looks like a huge masonry breast decorates its roofline. The exterior is Third Empire Revival and inside the designers have been given free rein. If you were ever in any doubt that places like this are pure theatre, the designers have gone out of their way to ensure that you grasp the point. Behind the concierge's desk are men in powder blue frock-coats and knee-breeches, which top off their silk hose. All they were missing were powdered perukes. You could almost hear the job description echoing through the decades, 'Okay, this is your cozzie, this is the set where you'll work and these are the lines you have to say to the guests.'

We took a drink in the bar, a big room dressed in dark wood a bit reminiscent of the Oak Room in New York's Plaza Hotel. You can get weird drinks here for a lot of money. We settled on the Pimms Royale, being Pimms topped up with champagne at €14 a glass. The real fun starts when you need to go to the loo. The Negresco's trademark is an 'N' with laurel leaves arranged at the sides, very similar to Napoleon's device. This confusion is fostered by the Negresco, attempting to create a link with the illustrious emperor, no matter how tenuous. So when you go to the men's loo you find a recreation of a Napoleonic campaign tent, with urinals that give you the impression you're pissing over a parapet with dragoons galloping below, while the copper wash basins are cunningly disguised within faux campaign chests with sabre handles. Brings a whole new meaning to 'as camp as a row of tents'.

You can't stay in the Riviera without thinking about food, and after we'd exhausted the Michelin stars nearby, it was time to try different fare. There's a restaurant in Nice called 'La Petite Maison', which has built up something of a reputation over the years, since it has been patronised by various luminaries of the music and film business. A group of five of us, plus two more friends that we met at a nearby table were universally snubbed and dismissed with great Gallic panache by the lady owner, who clearly felt there wasn't one among us fit to grace her establishment. When Harry called over a waiter half way through a very mediocre meal to point to a leaking ceiling that was dripping on his head, the response was 'c'est normal', accompanied by a gesture that eloquently said 'do I look like a plumber to you?' The mystery to me was that a place that really didn't try very hard was so full of people. As we were leaving madame eventually recognised Paul. 'Ah monsieur,' she simpered, 'weren't you here once before with Elton John?' But it was too late to ingratiate, we were pissed off by then, and in Harry's case, wet as well.

Just up the road from this place-to-avoid is 'Terre de Truffe', a truly fabulous shop that everyone ought to visit. As its name suggests it's devoted entirely to the black diamond, or the truffle. The smell inside the shop is indescribable, truffles of every ilk are on display from the common Burgundian truffle to the white truffle of Alba at prices that would make your hair stand on end. Still, a good-sized Burgundian truffle, enough to truffle a half-dozen eggs for tomorrow's breakfast was €16, an affordable luxury. €20 buys you a bottle of white truffle flavoured olive oil, another bargain.

Some of the best dishes I ate were in the amazing starred restaurants, but some dishes were remarkable in even very simple eateries. In Eze, near Monte Carlo, there's an easily missed roadside cafe/bar called 'La Vieille Maison', known locally as Momo's. At a simple lunch here one day the 'plat du jour' was steak tartare, which was exquisitely done and at €8.50 was incredible value. There was good food too at 'La Colombe D'Or' in St. Paul de Vence, a much more upmarket and very chic restaurant. You have to go up into the hills to find Vence and then up a little further to get to St. Paul. The views from its ancient ramparts are long; right across the rolling hills to the blue Mediterranean on the horizon. In the late 1800s and early 1900s artists used to come to this part of Provence for the clarity of the light and many of them stayed right here in St. Paul de Vence in a little hotel called 'La Colombe D'Or'. Some of these artists couldn't afford to pay for their rooms or their board, so they paid with their paintings, many of which are on the walls of the dining room today. This could so easily be an unremarkable story of simple barter, except that the artists who stayed here had names like Picasso, Miro, Manet, Monet and Renoir. We ate our lunch underneath a Picasso and a Miro.

The town itself reminded me of both San Gimignano and Castle Coombe, two places that have become almost exclusively the preserve of tourists. It seemed to me to have lost that feeling of township - a place where people live, work, sleep and go about their daily business. St. Paul de Vence is almost totally filled with art galleries. Its tiny little roads, beautifully paved with pebble and flag, wind through the ancient stone buildings where steps have worn smooth through the passage of countless feet. Every open doorway, every window, every orifice is an art gallery displaying paintings and sculpture. This is a town that makes its living from Art.

Nearby is the Matisse chapel, where Matisse painted the interior with almost one single line. The good nuns who curate this masterpiece are careful to change the opening hours regularly to keep the tourists out, and this strategy worked for us. But we did get to see the epigonous Cocteau chapel in Villefranche, which is tended by a stern lady 'd'un certaine age' who lets you in for €2 a head. I found you can irritate French people by referring to Jean Cocteau as 'that famous sub-mariner with his ship 'Calypso''.

If you like finding Irish connections with places, Roquebrune, near Monte Carlo, is where W. B. Yeats was briefly interred - or just possibly still is. When he died here in 1939 his widow arranged for him to be buried, but on a temporary 5 year deal, intending to bring his body back to Ireland before that time was up. However the second world war intervened, and by the time the arrangements could be made, the French authorities had already disinterred Yeats's remains and placed them in an ossary. Ossaries are used quite frequently on the continent - when the body has decomposed the bones are placed in a vault that is filled only with bones and there they remain. By the time Mrs. Yeats came looking for the bodily remains, the poet had become a famous man, so no one was going to admit to having mixed up his bones with those of hundreds of others. With great pragmatism the local Abbe gathered up a few bones from the ossary and presented them to the widow. These bones are now buried in Sligo, but there are many who believe that his actual bones are still in the French ossary.

Another Irish connection had us doing a longish drive with Harry at the wheel to visit Chateau Vignelaure near Aix-en-Provence. This beautiful chateau is owned by Irishman David O'Brien and his wife Catherine and it's where they make the fine wine of the same name. After a gentle kitchen lunch accompanied by fabulous wines we went on a tour of the estate, which has become almost perfectly manicured since I last saw it five years ago.

On days when the sun shone brightly, the car roof came down and we did little drives, like a trip to Eze Village, which is reached via the Moyenne Corniche and is perched like an eagle's eyrie on the cliffs overlooking Cap Ferrat and Cap d'Estelle. There's a wonderful terrace up here where you can sip a good Provencal Bandol and admire the stunning view. You get a good idea from here of how mountainous the terrain is, and how hard it's been to squeeze in roads, railways and houses on these precipitous slopes. The railway to Italy runs along the coast as does the lower road, the Basse Corniche. There's a middle road, the Moyenne Corniche and there's the highest one, running along the tops of the hills, called the Grande Corniche.

It's easy to take a train to Italy, they run frequently, and they're so cheap they're free. Well, if you had hoped, like us, to buy your ticket on the train, you'd be off the train at the border in Mentone without anyone having asked you for a ticket or having tried to sell you one, so with but a hint of guilt you travel for free. We'd come to Mentone to see the fruit and vegetable market, but on the day we got there they were about to start a major bicycle race to Nice, so we went on to Bordighera in Italy for lunch to avoid the bike tifosi. But even a brief tour of the market makes you wonder why we put up with what do in Ireland. Here we are in the most expensive part of France and everything's cheap by Irish standards. Vegetables are piled up and polished to display at their best, their variety is astounding even in February, their prices cheap. You soon realise that even vegetables can be sexy.

There are some signs that the Riviera may be slowing up a little, this year's Midem in Cannes was less attended than usual, but none the less it still has a lot to offer. It's remorselessly chic, the people are beautiful and well-dressed, the towns and cities are well-kept and tidy. I can't help feeling that it has all this style and panache because until the 1860s this was Italy. The great unifier Garibaldi was born and bred in Nice, or Nizza as it then was, where the main square carries his name even in these French times. Some of the villas on the coast here are incredible, monuments to Mammon where no expense has been spared and more than anything else, you realise that in the past 100 years, anyone who was anyone, sooner or later passed through here. Film stars, magnates, impressarios, industrialists, minor royalty and profligate trust-fund babes have all left their mark here, leaving a heritage of famous names linked to beautiful places. I'll go back as soon as I can.

La Colombe d'Or, St. Paul. Tel. 00 33 4 93 32 80 02
La Petite Maison, Nice. Tel. 00 33 4 93 85 71 53