About France

My articles have appeared in the publications, Bonjour Paris, France Today, Complete France, The Good Life France, and Frenchly. 

 
Une Gersoise

Gersois Charm

  Imagine traveling to the most rural, least industrialized corner of southwest France with the purest air and longest-living people, isolated from main highways and train lines. Include in this picture white clouds floating in deep blue skies, rolling green hills tufted with flocks of sheep, and herds of blonde Aquitaine cows surrounded by myriad

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Romeo & Juliet

Obsessive Love

Of Music and Muses: Hector Berlioz’s Obsessive Love It can often be said that love has no limits or boundaries, but obsession does. This is no more true than in the relationship between the French composer, Hector Berlioz, and the Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson. In the years following the French Revolution (1789), a new movement

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Waiting for a convivial lunch in Gascony to begin.

French Bounty

“I think food, culture, people and landscape are all absolutely inseparable.” Anthony Bourdain The lure of France has never dimmed, nor has the lure of French cuisine. In Gascony, the Pays Basque, Occitanie and Provence in particular (where I currently lead slow travel tours) good food, carefully prepared with first rate ingredients is not a

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Chocolate

Death by Chocolate

The history of chocolate, and its circuitous route to Paris, is not for the squeamish. From human sacrifice to the infamous Spanish Inquisition, the growing and harvesting of cacao seeds for the production of chocolate has tortured, enslaved, and seduced. The cacao tree was not domesticated in Central America as previously thought. Traces of cacao

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Paris Arrondissements

The Paris Alphabet

The unique charm of Paris is based upon its savoir-vivre, that je ne sais quoi… the indescribable, yet completely recognizable, way of life which has become embedded in our subconscious. To “think Paris”, as the writer Paul Valéry noted, is to know the true insider history of what makes this city a mélange of mortar and myth.

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Lost In Paris

As anyone who has ever visited Paris knows, it is a walking city. Even the monumentality of its arrondisements does not overshadow its human scale and accessibility for pedestrians. Keeping in mind that every building of any note is usually within walking distance of the Seine, I decided to forgo a map and wander, à

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Collioure Harbor

Collioure Magic

Catalonia, where the craggy Pyrénées mountains descend into the Mediterranean Sea. The view seen from high above the coast encompasses a rich landscape of geometrically captivating vineyards and jagged shoreline. Inextricably anchored between France and Spain, Collioure is considered the pearl of the Côte Vermeille. Known since the time of the seagoing Phoenicians, this charmingly

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L'Isle sur la Sorgue, Provence

Vaucluse Venice

“Song of the Sorgue” River rushing by so fast, at full pelt on your own… River where the lightening ends and where my home begins… René Char A subterranean aquifer, the source of the Sorgue River, runs along the rim of a precipitously rugged outcropping high above the village of Fontaine de Vaucluse, its 7-kilometer

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D'Artagnan, above Lupiac Lake

Pays d’Artagnan

As you drive through the remote, southwestern French countryside, down narrow plane tree-lined allées past villages shrouded in mystery, you get the sense that the area looks much as it did during the time of d’Artagnan, one of its most renowned heroes. He was not just a fictionalized character from the Alexandre Dumas novels, but a real person named Charles Ogier

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