Authors:Robert Speaight, Francis Pagan,
Publisher: Companion Guides
Keywords: companion, guides, guide, burgundy
Number of Pages: 424
Published: 2000-04-10
List price: $34.95
ISBN-10: 1900639173
ISBN-13: 9781900639170

As elegant as it is exhaustive. The whole book has body and bouquet, (its author) is well-read, witty, relaxed and impeccably observant. GUARDIAN Burgundy is one of the richest areas in France - rich in its art and architecture, its history, its food and wines, and its glorious countryside. Nowhere in Europe are there greater examples of the Romanesque: the basilica of the Madeleine at Vézelay, the sculptures of Gislebertus of Autun, the cathedral of St Philibert at Tournus. The very names of its vineyards - Corton, Chambertin, Montrachet - conjure up the robust and mature bouquet of the prov

Author: Richard Barber
Publisher: Companion Guides
Keywords: companion, guides, dordogne, gascony, guide
Number of Pages: 348
Published: 2002-06-26
List price: $34.95
ISBN-10: 1900639270
ISBN-13: 9781900639279

The corner of south-west France comprising Gascony and the Dordogne is the quintessence of provincial France. Many will be content to enjoy the douceur de vivre, the good food and the unspoiled countryside, but for those who are interested in the past this is rich terrain. Much of England’s history between 1154 and 1453 was bound up with events in the region, as the French lands of Henry II remorselessly slipped from the grasp of the English kings. This is the land of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Gaston Phebus, the scene of Richard I’s death, and of the Black Prince’s triumphs an

Authors:Alastair Boyd, Alastair Boyd, Richard Oliver,
Publisher: Companion Guides
Keywords: companion, guides, spain, madrid, guide, central
Number of Pages: 488
Published: 2002-05-06
List price: $24.95
ISBN-10: 1900639378
ISBN-13: 9781900639378

This book performs with great thoroughness all the usual functions of a guidebook. But it is much more than a mere inventory of buildings, paintings, sculpture, routes and views, supplemented by appendices packed with practical information. The authors - from their long experience and deep knowledge of the country - are exceptionally well-equipped to draw together into a coherent whole all the threads of history, art, culture and recent developments. They steer you in most rewarding directions, enlivening the hallowed hush of museum or sacristy with an original interpretation of some great pai

Author: John Freely
Publisher: Companion Guides
Keywords: companion, guides, marmara, istanbul, guide
Number of Pages: 448
Published: 2000-05-04
List price: $34.95
ISBN-10: 1900639319
ISBN-13: 9781900639316

Istanbul is the only city in the world that stands astride two continents, spreading across from Europe into Asia at the southern end of the Bosphorus, the incomparably beautiful strait linking the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara in northwestern Turkey. This Companion Guide to Istanbul goes as far as the region around Marmara from the Bosphorus to the Dardanelles, which flows into the Aegean past the historic ruins of Troy on its Asian shore. Revised and updated for this new edition, the book is a guide to the Byzantine and Ottoman monuments and to the many other places of great historic int

Author: Brian Ladd
Publisher: Companion Guides
Keywords: companion, guides, guide, berlin
Number of Pages: 514
Published: 2004-06-27
List price: $29.95
ISBN-10: 1900639289
ISBN-13: 9781900639286

Most people don’t think of Berlin as a beautiful city, but it is filled with stunning sights, sounds and textures, and they will astonish you all the more if you know the stories behind them. Today’s Berlin is new and vibrant, but history has left its scars here as in few other places on earth. If you look in the right places, you can find vestiges of the glories of old Prussia as well as the abominations of Hitler’s Third Reich and of the outer bulwark of the Soviet empire. Brian Ladd, a historian who has been returning to Berlin for twenty-five years, leads the reader to fa

Author: Hugh Honour
Publisher: Companion Guides
Keywords: companion, guides, guide, venice
Number of Pages: 320
Published: 2001-05-24
List price: $34.95
ISBN-10: 1900639246
ISBN-13: 9781900639248

There are few pleasanter ways of passing a summer’s evening than sitting over a cup of coffee, and perhaps a glass of Aurum, in the Piazza San Marco. It is especially agreeable on those nights when the Venetian city band thunders away at some throbbingly romantic piece... And all the while the younger inhabitants parade around the square, chattering, flirting, quarrelling and staring at their visitors with that same unwinking gaze that Venetians have turned on their guests for the past five centuries. The facade of San Marco closes the scene in a glitter of golden mosaic and a bubbling o

Author: Ian Dunlop
Publisher: Companion Guides
Keywords: companion, guides, paris, country, guide, round
Number of Pages: 356
Published: 1996-05-01
List price: $24.95
ISBN-10: 1900639009
ISBN-13: 9781900639002

This is a second, revised and updated edition of Ian Dunlop’s essential guide, originally published under the title of The Companion Guide to the Ile de France.This guide is a labour of love. It is a key that will open many tiny, hidden, forsaken places, a ruined keep in a farmyard, the remains of an arch in a field, an escutcheon, forlorn and heralding nothing but desolation and an old Revolution, a triumphal entrance leading to emptiness, a stone stag in an autumnal forest that has heard the French horn for 200 years, and the infinite sadness of the Petit Trianon. SPECTATOR