Walk the short loop around Place du Casino and the density of the shopfronts becomes obvious fairly quickly. The area, known locally as the Carre d'Or, or Golden Circle, houses Cartier, Van Cleef Arpels, Chopard, Bulgari, Piaget and Repossi within a few hundred metres of pavement, alongside fashion houses including Chanel, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Gucci and Prada.
Cartier's own boutique sits directly on Place du Casino, in a building whose interior mixes modern fittings with a more classical design, and offers the full range the house is known for, from bridal jewellery to fine watches. Its position, facing the Casino de Monte Carlo across the square, is not incidental. Monaco's jewellers have historically clustered around the places where their clientele already gathers for other reasons, the casino chief among them.
That clustering has practical roots as much as aesthetic ones. A visitor able to walk from a hotel suite to a dozen of the world's most recognised jewellery houses without needing a car has, in effect, been given a single afternoon's itinerary that would otherwise require stops in several different cities. Monaco's compact geography, the whole principality covers barely two square kilometres, makes that itinerary unusually easy to walk.
The result is a shopping district built less around volume than around a small number of extremely high value transactions, a pattern reflected in the yachts moored a short walk away in Port Hercule and the real estate prices in the surrounding blocks. Few cities anywhere pack this many recognised maisons into so short a stretch of pavement, and fewer still do it around a single square.