Bono Has Another Story to Tell

“W. B. Yeats was buried just down the road,” says Bono near the end of our first afternoon together, name-checking the famed Irish poet. It’s early April and the U2 singer is walking me up the driveway of his vacation estate in the South of France, toward my waiting car. Behind us, the Mediterranean Sea fills the horizon, blue as far as the eye can see. His property stretches before us. A few houses. Couple of pools. It’s blissfully private, even if the glitz of Monaco and Cannes isn’t too far away. Bono is not the first Irishman to trade the dampness of his home country for the sunny shores of the Côte d’Azur—but he might be doing it better than the rest.