Avenue Jean Médecin

The Avenue Jean Médecin is a street located in the center of Nice, one of the city's main north-south traffic arteries. In Niçard, it is officially named the "avenguda Jouan-Medecin, consòu de Nissa". It constitutes the city's main shopping street and is called "The Avenue" by residents.

Laid out in 1864 under the general plan of the Consiglio Ornato dating to the period when Nice was ruled by the Counts of Savoy, the street was constructed in a natural valley, the Saint-Michel Valley beginning at Place Masséna and lining up with the Pont-Neuf. It reflects the will of the authorities of this time to control development of the modern city on the right bank of the Paillon.

It is walking on this road in July 1947 that the first nine notes of the international song C'est si bon come to mind of the composer Henri Betti.

The street has had the following names:

The avenue runs north from Place Masséna to the Marseille–Ventimiglia railway, where it is continued by the Passage Max-Vérola passage, which runs under the viaduct carrying the rail line and Voie Mathis and merges into Avenue Malausséna, named after another former mayor of Nice. The streets leading north continue to follow the course of the natural valley, although the river now runs in an underground culvert beneath them. Avenue Jean Médecin intersects with several major east-west thoroughfares: Rue de la Liberté and Rue de l'Hôtel des Postes, Rue du Maréchal Joffre and Rue Pastorelli, Boulevard Victor-Hugo and Boulevard Dubouchage, Avenue Thiers and Boulevard Raimbaldi.

While the southern section of Avenue Jean Médecin is a tourist area, the northern section is more of a neighborhood artery. The same is true of the surrounding streets. On it are the main shops of the city, both for local residents and for tourists, and the Nice headquarters of the larger French banks: the Credit Lyonnais building, built in 1890 and designed by Sebastien-Marcel Biasini, the BNP Paribas building built in 1921 and designed by Charles Dalmas, and the famous branch of the Société Générale that was robbed by Albert Spaggiari in 1976. The remainder of the avenue has two cinemas, the Basilica of Notre-Dame basilica, opened in 1868, and the Nicetoile shopping center. Other buildings of architectural interest include the Belle Époque Riviera Building, built in 1913, six stories high and covering ten thousand square meters, which is currently occupied by Fnac and, somewhat south of that, a building in Art Deco style housing a branch of the Monoprix chain. At the southern end of the avenue is Galeries Lafayette, located here since 1916, in a building with a red ocher facade and arcades reminiscent of Turin.

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