Extract from Burrel’s memoirs: “Tattoos On My Soul” – “Monaco.”
Arriving mid-afternoon on a glorious sunny day, carry-on in hand, I grabbed a cab for the run to the hotel. I’ll never, ever forget my first impressions of Monaco. It was instant infatuation!
Monaco is a small, ancient principality on the South Coast of France. It’s situated on the Mediterranean, boxed in by France, the French Alps and Italy, giving you an eyeful of white-capped, mountains and blue, blue sea as you fly in. The weather is fine three hundred days a year. This day was no exception.
The entire “country” straddles only a single square mile. Its monarch, Prince Rainier III*, pulled off a kind of Bugsy Siegel stroke of genius, by reinventing Monaco as a tax haven and gaming paradise. Its citizens pay no income tax. Their riches are protected by the toughest security you’ll find almost anywhere on the planet. With one officer per hundred residents, Monaco probably has more police per square foot than any other country in the world.
It’s congested all right, over-developed and glitzy. But the place still manages to ooze sophistication, class and old money. Envisage an aristocratic, stun-ningly elegant Vegas, with a century-old heart and a glittering, blue harbor packed with row after row of sparkling white yachts. I could smell the wealth….
A room was reserved for me at the famous Hotel de Paris located right in the heart of Monte-Carlo, so I went straight there. My taxi dropped me off in front of the foyer. The Hotel was grand in a well-bred kind of way, immaculately decorated and dripping with exquisite things. It boasted views of the palace, the Old Town, the harbor and the Casino. I freshened up, hooked up for a while with the guys I was meeting, and then, still a little jet-lagged and a lot shell-shocked, went for a stroll.
There were wonders every which way I turned. This had to be happening in an alternative dimension, because a place like this couldn’t possibly be of the same world I came from!
* Sadly Prince Ranier passed away as I was writing this book and has been succeeded by his son.
