Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The monastery of Cimiez finds its origins in the chapel of Notre-Dame de Cimiez, built by Benedictine monks of Saint-Pons Abbey from 1010. This chapel, mentioned in a charter of 1010, was ceded on 15 November 1546 to the Friars Minor of Observance (Franciscans), who enlarged it after losing their convent during the siege of Nice in 1543. The Franciscans gradually transformed the whole, adding the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption (XV century), a cloister (XVI century), and convent buildings.

The church houses three major works by the primitive Niçois Louis Bréa: the Pietà, the Crucifixion and the Deposition, covering 40 years of his career. The cloister, the setting of classical concerts during the Nuits Musicales de Nice, also serves as a place of summer worship. The garden, a former monastic vegetable garden, is famous for the invention of the mesclun: a mixture of seeds created by the monks, offered to the poor in baskets called espurtoula.

The monastery is closely linked to the religious life of Nice: it welcomed the processions of the brotherhoods of penitents and still manages the parish of Sainte-Marie-des-Anges (Cimiez, Vallon des Fleurs and Falicon). Among his notable figures, Brother Marc, who had become a fear Marcos de Niza, was said to have inspired the name of San Francisco (California). The cemetery attaches to the monastery houses the tombs of Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy and Roger Martin du Gard ( Nobel Prize 1937).

Ranked a Historic Monument in 1993 (buildings) and 1994 (garden floor and cemetery), the site benefited from a major restoration of roofs, facades and cloisters between 2013 and 2014, carried out with the DRAC PACA. Today, a fraternity of four Franciscan brothers from Assisi (Italy) provides parish service.

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