Napoleon in north Cork
The Italian name
Montenotte takes its name from the Battle of Montenotte in 1796, one of Napoleon's first victories in the hills of northern Italy. The name was fashionable in early 19th-century Ireland - romantic, continental, faintly grand - and the Cork merchant who hung it on his new hillside development was making a statement. It is not an old Irish place name dressed up; it is a Victorian-era import, the same impulse that named the docks suburb next door Tivoli after the gardens in Rome.
The Montenotte Hotel, 1820s to now
Lee View House and the merchant prince
The big house on the hilltop was built in the 1820s for a Cork butter merchant and named Lee View House, sited so the owner could watch his cargo move in and out of the harbour below. It became the Lee View Hotel in 1948, the Country Club in 1960, and the Montenotte Hotel in 2006, with a full redevelopment from 2017. One footnote: U2 stayed during its Country Club years, and a rooftop photograph from 1 March 1980 later turned up on the cover of the band's greatest-hits package. The hotel today runs the Glasshouse restaurant, the Bellevue spa and the small Cameo cinema.
A church that became a concert hall
Live at St Luke's
At the foot of the hill on Summerhill North stands St Luke's, a Romanesque Revival Anglican church completed in the 1870s to designs by John Benson and William Henry Hill - the third church on a site dedicated to Luke the Evangelist. It was deconsecrated, bought by Cork City Council, restored around 2010, and since 2015 has run as the music venue Live at St Luke's, programmed by The Good Room. The stone barrel of the nave makes it one of the better-sounding rooms in the city. A few steps away at St Luke's Cross sits a little octagonal toll booth from around 1880, long disused, the kind of thing you walk past without seeing.