A Literary Guide to Provence
Daniel Vitaglione
Provence through the eyes of its writers—those who wrote of it in Provençal or French and also those visitors who were moved by its beauty—that is the inspiration behind A Literary Guide to Provence. In this compact travel guide, Marseilles native Daniel Vitaglione presents a literary panorama of the region of southern France from the Avignon of Mistral to Colette’s St. Tropez.
Including such sites as the birthplace of Nostradamus and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade’s castle, A Literary Guide to Provence presents a thousand years of history entwined with maps and photos that provide readers on tour with a sense of the historical import of this most beautiful of regions even as they experience it firsthand.
Both authors of Provençal ancestry and those who came to love and live in Provence are featured in this comprehensive and enchanting picture of the garden place of France. The Riviera enticed Virginia Woolf. Toulon inspired two novels by Georges Sand. Robert Louis Stevenson resided in Hyères, as did Edith Wharton. Le Lavandou was Willa Cather’s favorite place. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in St. Raphael and Juan-les-Pins, where he wrote Tender is the Night.
This illustrated guide follows in these writers’ footsteps, and the practical information on hotels and restaurants (phones, web sites, email, etc.) make it the ideal traveling companion for armchair tourists and those who cannot resist seeing Provence for themselves.
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About Daniel Vitaglione
Reviews for A Literary Guide to Provence
editor of Poe Abroad
“Provence has enthralled centuries of writers, from the troubadours, Petrarch, Nostradamus and Frederic Mistral to Sade, Flaubert, Camus, Cather, Beckett and Woolf. Daniel Vitaglione (A Dictionary of Idioms: French-American, American-French), who lives in the region, tracks its eminent history in A Literary Guide to Provence. He provides information both practical (hotels and restaurants) and cultural (festival listings), plus some background on the region’s language, Provençal, still spoken ‘in remote villages and among the older population.’ Even better, however, Vitaglione provides a town-by-town tour of literary-historical sites: the abandoned monastery outside of Saint-Tropez, for example, where Guy de Maupassant encountered an elderly couple who had been in hiding since their youthful elopement.”