Provence Az 1st Edition Peter Mayle by Peter Mayle 9781400044429, 1400044421 instant download after payment.

An indispensable, richly informative, and always entertaining sourcebook on Provence by the writer who has made the region his own. Though organized from A to Z, this is hardly a conventional work of reference. It is rather a selection of those aspects of Provence that Peter Mayle in almost twenty years there has found to be the most interesting, curious, delicious, or down-right fun. In more than 170 entries he writes about subjects as wide-ranging as architecture and zingue-zingue-zoun (in the local patois, a word meant to describe the sound of a violin), as diverse as expatriates, Aix-en-Provence, the Proven?al character, legends, lavender, linguistic oddities, the museum of the French Foreign Legion, the museum of the corkscrew, the origins of “La Marseillaise,” and a bawdy folklore character named Fanny. And, of course, he writes about food and drink: vin ros?, truffles, olives, melons, bouillabaisse, the cheese that killed a Roman emperor, even a cure for indigestion. The wonderful accompanying artwork includes curiosities Mayle has gathered over the years—matchbooks, drawings, century-old ads, photos, tourist brochures, maps. Provence A-Z is a delight for Peter Mayle’s ever-growing audience and the perfect complement to any guidebook on Provence, or, for that matter, France.