Provence A-Z

Provence A-Z

An indispensable, richly informative, and always entertaining sourcebook on Provence by the writer who has made the region his own. <br><br> 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. <br><br> In more than 170 entries he writes about subjects as wide-ranging as architecture and <i>zingue-zingue-zoun </i>(in the local patois, a word meant to describe the sound of a violin), as diverse as expatriates, Aix-en-Provence, the Provençal 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.<br><br> And, of course, he writes about food and drink: <i>vin rosé,</i> truffles, olives, melons, <i>bouillabaisse,</i> the cheese that killed a Roman emperor, even a cure for indigestion. The wonderful accompanying artwork includes curiosities Mayle has gathered over the years<i>—</i>matchbooks, drawings, century-old ads, photos, tourist brochures, maps.<br> <i>Provence A-Z </i>is a delight for Peter Mayle’s ever-growing audience and the perfect complement to any guidebook on Provence, or, for that matter, France.