La Jeune Fille de XVIII Siecle: The Young Girl from the 18th Century I found this curious book some time ago. When you search for it on the internet, it’s prefaced with “nos petites grandes mères” or “our little grandmothers.” I love etchings and engravings (having done quite a few …

Punnets full of the best tasting strawberries you’ve ever imagined have arrived at the local veg shop. There are new leaves on the trees and yes, it’s my birthday month! The locals say that the season officially starts at Easter. To mark this, it seems that many events have been …

In the centre of the pretty village of Saint Saturnin les Apt is a peaceful square (home to the vibrant Tuesday morning market), and to one side is a small garden area that sits in front of a dramatic stone wall, which is a memorial to the dramatic and devastating …

The ‘Festival des Jardins de la Cote d’Azur’ looks to be an interesting new venture. It runs every day from 1 April to 1 May in Nice, Cannes, Grasse, Antibes, and Menton. There are two sections to this festival. The first will be 10 gardens specially created in open spaces …

It’s Academy Award season, and as it was with me a year ago when I wrote of Marcel Pagnol, I am drawn back to Provence, in fact to his hometown of Aubagne. On this occasion it began last fall when I was discussing with my wife Benedicte, who is French, …

Pierre Bonnard loved his home at Le Cannet. He painted his wife Marthe in the bath, the cats in the dining room, the splendid colours of his garden, and, naturally, his view of the sparkling Mediterranean. Le Cannet now has the world’s only museum dedicated to the artist. The current …

In the past, most language classes followed a similar scholastic approach, typically involving the memorisation of verbs, tenses and sentence structures. The process is the same whether students were attempting to conquer one of the romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian or Catalan), a Germanic tongue, a Slavic dialect or …

Contributor blog post by Vaucluse Dreamer: If you’ve been following my blog for a while you’ll know that one of the things I love most about France is the chance to spend the weekends pottering round some of the fabulous local ‘brocante’ markets. In the Summer, the weekends pass by …

It took 20 visits to Provence before Keith Van Sickle and his wife decided to make the region their part-time home. A Northern California native, Van Sickle spent his early years on an island in the San Francisco Bay – Alameda, California. “It’s a sleepy town, an oasis of 1950’s …

Contributor blog post by Vaucluse Dreamer: There is something so wonderful about French buildings and all too often we miss seeing them as we hurry past or simply focus on everything at eye-level. In the past I’ve probably been one of the worst, focusing on just cramming as many of …