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Tende: French, But Not Really
Such a welcome from the French was unusual. We had just driven up along the French-Italian border from Nice and the Riviera, where waiters corrected our grammar and shopkeepers could not be bothered to utter a merci. Conversely, Tende seemed eerily pleased with our presence. For a moment we thought we had unknowingly exited France, and slipped over the border into the care of French-speaking Italians. Somehow this anomaly town called Tende, like the wild boar, had wound up on our plate.