Provence
-- A Place in the Sun Magazine
Sun-flooded landscapes and glittering night skies, silvery olive groves, Roman ruins and luminous paintings, Cadogan's bestselling guide takes you beyond the trinket shops and traffic jams to find the simple cuisine and outstanding wines, vibrant cities and perched villages that are the true Provence.
Hand-picked and peaceful places to stay and eat, easy-to-use maps, clear layout and intelligent cultural background combine with discerning advice on everything from markets and mountains to festivals and vineyard visits.
Scented stories of perfume, papal pleasures and troubadours' tales add a glowing touch of Provençal color to a guide that is as illuminating as it is reliable.
Excerpt: Varian Fry
In the early 1940s, in spite of open visa quotas, the US Department of State with its prejudiced, bury-its-head-in-the-sand bureaucracy maintained a policy of turning back ships of refugees from Hitler. Consulates in Europe were advised, as one memo put it, ‘to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the grant of the visas’. In one particularly shameful episode, the US Vice Consul in Lyon denied visas to Jewish children because their parents might be arrested, leaving their children to become public charges in the USA.
The one hero in the story was Varian Fry. Two months after the Nazis occupied Marseille, 32-year old Fry, editor of a New York foreign policy review, arrived in the city as the representative of a privately funded group called the Emergency Rescue Committee. ...click here to read the rest
Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls can be reached at: michel.pauls@wanadoo.fr
