La Turbie

La Turbie is a village of about 3,000 on the ridge above Monaco, at 480 m on the Grande Corniche. It exists because of a single Roman monument, and it is named after it: Tropaea Augusti became Turbia, then La Turbie.

The Trophy of the Alps

Raised by the Roman Senate in 6 BC to celebrate Augustus’s subjugation of the forty-five Alpine tribes who had blocked the road between Italy and Gaul. It stood 50 m high — a square podium carrying a circular colonnade with a statue of Augustus on top — and it marked the boundary between Italy and Gallia Narbonensis.

The inscription on the podium lists all forty-five tribes by name; Pliny the Elder copied it, which is how the missing parts were restored. The monument was a fortress in the Middle Ages, was partly blown up on Louis XIV’s orders in 1705, and served as a quarry for the village afterwards — the church is built of its stone.

It was restored between 1929 and 1933 with American money, and about a third of it now stands. There is a small museum on site, and the terrace looks down 480 m onto Monaco.

The village

• Église Saint-Michel-Archange — eighteenth-century Nice baroque, oval in plan, built largely from the Trophy’s masonry, with paintings attributed to the school of Bréa and a Van Loo
• The medieval streets — a small walled core with two gates, on the line of the Roman Via Julia Augusta
• The Roman road — sections of the original paving survive on the way out of the village

Dante mentions La Turbie in the Purgatorio, using it and Lerici as the two ends of the Ligurian coast — a line the village has not forgotten.

The view

This is the other reason to come. From the Trophy terrace and from the Grande Corniche either side of the village, the whole coast is laid out: Monaco directly below, Cap Martin, Menton, the Italian border, and on a clear day Corsica.

The Tête de Chien, the rock spur 550 m above Monaco, is twenty minutes’ walk away and gives the classic vertical view down onto the principality.

Getting there

• By car — the Grande Corniche (D2564). Monaco 15 minutes, Nice 25, Menton 20. Parking below the village. See parking in France.
• By bus — line 11 from Monaco and Nice; slow but frequent enough, and it saves the corniche driving.
• On foot — a path climbs from Monaco in about an hour and a half, steeply.

Around

• Monaco — directly below
• Èze — 10 minutes west along the ridge
• Roquebrune-Cap-Martin — 15 minutes east, with the oldest keep in France
• Parc départemental de la Grande Corniche — walking on the ridge, with Fort de la Revère
• Menton — 20 minutes

When to go

Any time. At 480 m La Turbie is several degrees cooler than the coast, which makes it a good July stop, and the visibility is best in winter after the mistral. The Trophy closes on Mondays.

See the Côte d’Azur.

Photo credits

Photographs on this page come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences, by Miniwark, CC BY-SA 4.0:

• The Trophy
• The restored colonnade
• Saint-Michel

Weather in La Turbie

Updated: 1 September 2026