Claudia Bevilacqua’s new photo exhibition brings out Nice’s most authentic, Italian self.
For someone with the eye and patience to see the beauty in the small, ordinary things in life, Nice becomes a classic movie set. This is exactly the frequency that Italian photographer Claudia Bevilacqua tunes into. She captures scenes that are neither vintage adverts nor fashion shoots, but playfully staged moments that celebrate the Nice way of life. Her photo exhibition is a love letter to a French city that never quite severed ties with its Italian past. La Dolce Nizza is currently on at the Musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre through September 6.
In Bevilacqua’s photos, strong, confident women play the lead role. They laugh, dance, and act out the drama of life as if in an old Fellini film. Some strut along the Promenade des Anglais in their wide-brimmed hats and dresses fluttering in the wind. A group of friends in retro swimsuits have a lively conversation over a shared bowl of spaghetti at La Réserve. And others yet lose themselves amongst the market stalls on the Cours Saleya or ride down the narrow streets of Old Nice on a Vespa. The air of freedom – and of Italy – is palpable.
These photos embody what inspires the artist’s vision: a joyful sense of the theatrical, a cinematic aesthetic and a genuine tenderness for the women she photographs.
From Lazio to Nice, taking the long way
Bevilacqua’s path to this project is its own kind of story, and not the expected one. Hailing from Gallinaro, a small village in Lazio, she came to Paris 25 years ago, and then spent 13 years at the Kourou space base in French Guiana, working her way up to become the first woman to lead a company on the site – a career built in finance, then aerospace, in an industry that doesn’t tend to produce many photographers on the side.
She came back to mainland France in 2018 and, by her own account, “ran straight into boredom”. What followed was less a career change than a compulsion: since picking up a camera in 2019, she has barely ever put it down, traveling from Africa to India chasing faces and small human gestures. One recurring thread, the series Cordes Sensibles, shows people jumping rope – men, women, children, wherever she finds them – the same simple motion turning up in wildly different corners of the world, always rooted in wherever it happens to be shot. This artistic viewpoint has earned her the nickname of Humanist Photographer.
She found Nice the same year she left Guyane, and Nice seems to have found something in her, too. She settled a few steps from Cours Saleya. The way she talks about it is exactly how people talk about places that feel like home to them… the pastel shutters, the market smells, light moving across the buildings the way it moves across the buildings back home in Lazio. Maybe it takes an Italian newcomer’s eye to help the city find back to the authentic version of itself – La Bella, la Dolce Nizza.
The exhibition is located in the Galerie level of the museum. The concurrent Forgetmat show on in the same premises is also worth a visit.
VISITOR INFORMATION
La Dolce Nizza By Claudia Bevilacqua | Until 6 September, 2026
Galerie du musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre
Open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 am to 12.30 pm and 1.30 pm to 6 pm, closed on Monday
Admission €5, concessions available, ticket information here
VENUE DETAILS
Galerie du musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre
1, place Pierre Gautier
06300 Nice
Tel: +33 (0)4 97 13 42 20
PHOTO CREDITS
- Lead image © RIVIERA BUZZ, all rights reserved
- All other photos and images courtesy Ville de Nice
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