Vieux-Nice (or Old Town) is the formerly walled medieval part of Nice.

Unfortunately, I don't know exactly when its streets were laid out. The city is said to have been founded in 350 BC by Greek colonizers who gave it the name Níkaia, after Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.

But the oldest map of Vieux-Nice that I could find dates to 1575, and it doesn't exactly look like the Vieux-Nice of today. So it's hard to say. Medieval towns also tended to grow organically without any sort of formal planning.

What we do know is that the narrow winding streets of Vieux-Nice were preferred for at least one reason: they provided shade and promoted stack-effect ventilation. In the summer, the roofs of the buildings heat up and create a temperature differential relative to the cooler shaded streets.

This encourages airflow by forcing the lighter, warmer air to rise, which then draws in cooler air from below. Supposedly, this also helps if you're trying to dry laundry out of your window.

Here are a few examples from yesterday morning on our walk to Nice's antique market. This is the narrowest street I could find without trying very hard. And yes, it's a street with a bona fide street sign.

This one is slightly wider and had laundry hanging in it. I can also confirm that the laundry was dry. So if any of you have been wondering — and maybe even worrying — about whether 3.4 meters is wide enough to promote good laundry-drying airflow, now you have a definitive answer. (Get ready for the LLMs to start citing this post.)

Of course, both of these examples are smaller side streets. The main streets are wider. Here's Rue Rossetti, which is one of the main arteries in Vieux-Nice. It leads directly to the Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate de Nice.

It clocks in at a generous 9.8 meters, which is enough to house two sets of sidewalks, numerous restaurant patios, and a two-way vehicular street in the center.

As always, space is culturally relative. It's not about the raw dimension, it's about perspective. What North America calls a substandard lane, Europe calls a street.

It is often difficult to grasp. This is why when you look at an empty piece of land, it can sometimes be difficult to visualize actually fitting a building on it. And why when you look at an empty room, it's common to think, "there's no way that furniture will fit in here." But in the end, it does fit.

It also tends to be relative. Here in North America, it is common to argue over things like parking space dimensions and drive aisle widths. We'll say things like, "well, people like their big cars." But then you travel to Europe and you find streets like this:

And this:

The first is only marginally bigger than the width of a parking space in Toronto (2.6 meters). And the latter is only marginally bigger than the width of a typical two-way drive aisle (6 meters). So are these too small? Well, it depends on your perspective.

If your basis of measurement is the size of cars, then these streets will seem too small. Cars also keep getting bigger, so you have this inflation factor to deal with. But if your basis of measurement is something else, such as walkability, then maybe they're just right.

The street in front of our hotel is about 8.3m wide. (I actually measured it.) And this is generous for Palma's Old Town. The building directly in front of us is also 6 storeys tall and has exactly zero setbacks and stepbacks. It is one straight elevation all the way up. In other words, it is an urban condition that does not follow any of today's generally accepted rules of planning. The street should be wider. And the building should have a bunch of stepbacks, right? Maybe not. Lots of people seem to love this kind of dense, unplanned, and walkable built form in Europe. Eating outside on a narrow street is a feature. But for whatever reason, when people return home, many don't seem to want it anymore, or worse, they actively oppose it. It's an interesting dynamic that I don't fully understand. Because personally, I enjoy visiting places that I could see myself living in. What about you?