Living In Normandy

Entertaining at home in gracious French style. Born from her experience of everyday living in France, Sharon Santoni reveals the gracious, easy French way of entertaining guests at her countryside home, year-round. Personal stories evoke the spirit of the French lifestyle, while gorgeous photos make us feel right at home. Santoni creates lush bouquets from her garden and utilizes resources from surrounding nature to lay gorgeous tables both indoors and outdoors. Venues range from a Sunday morning breakfast on the patio, to a ladies lunch in her lush garden, a formal dinner in her dining room, and a picnic by the river. Santoni also shares 15 favorite recipes utilizing seasonal foods. Find inspiration for your tables throughout the seasons, and discover the simple pleasure of entertaining friends and family. Sharon Santoni writes the popular blog My French Country Home. She is the author of My Stylish French Girlfriends (Gibbs Smith). She resides in Normandy, France.

Presenting new light on the reality of religious life in Normandy, the author uses ideas about space and gender to examine the social pressures arising from such interaction around four main themes: display, reception and intrusion, enclosure and the family.

A stone's throw from Paris and renowned for its temperate climate, Normandy is a French region with something for everyone. Rich in culture, history, nature, and hearty cuisine, it attracts an increasing number of visitors and countless foreign homeowners. Its beauty and charm has seduced great artists and writers such as Monet in Giverny and Victor Hugo in Villequier. Share in the relaxed Norman lifestyle by sauntering along the beach in Deauville, stroll along riverbanks and forests in springtime. Normandy is famed for its gardens, and many are open to visitors, who can stroll the cloistered grounds of a monastery, or watercolor at Giverny. Discover that there is no such thing as a typical Norman home: locals invite us into their half-timbered houses, thatched cottages, or slate-roofed residences. Catch a glimpse at the end of a pathway of a medieval chateau with turrets or a Renaissance manor with mansard windows and balconies. No Normand table is complete without Calvados, Camembert, Cotentin oysters, hard cider, butter, and creme fraiche. Regional artisans still practice traditional Normand crafts, including lacemaking from Alencon, majolica from Vieux Rouen, and the region's famous armoires and clocks. Living in Normandy includes an indispensable guide with an extensive list of the region's best restaurants, hotels, brasseries, bed and breakfasts, as well as stores, boutiques, antique dealers, and tips on where to sample the famous local products.

In a busy modern life, meals are often relegated to five- or ten-minute time slots. The French have long been lauded as culinary experts, and the emphasis they place on time spent around the dinner table is yet another secret worth borrowing. Living la vie de château at Château Bosgouet in Normandy, Jane Webster and her Australian family have embraced the traditions of the French table with surprise and delight at each turn, from navigating the market to setting the table to making the most of a vegetable garden, and their adventures are captured here by the sophisticated eye of photographer Robyn Lea.

More than seventy years following the D-Day Landings of 6 June 1944, Normandy's war heritage continues to intrigue visitors and researchers. Receiving well over two million visitors a year, the Normandy landscape of war is among the most visited cultural sites in France. This book explores the significant role that heritage and tourism play in the present day with regard to educating the public as well as commemorating those who fought. The book examines the perspectives, experiences and insights of those who work in the field of war heritage in the region of Normandy where the D-Day landings and the Battle of Normandy occurred. In this volume practitioner authors represent a range of interrelated roles and responsibilities. These perspectives include national and regional governments and coordinating agencies involved in policy, planning and implementation; war cemetery commissions; managers who oversee particular museums and sites; and individual battlefield tour guides whose vocation is to research and interpret sites of memory. Often interviewed as key informants for scholarly articles, the day-to-day observations, experiences and management decisions of these guardians of remembrance provide valuable insight into a range of issues and approaches that inform the meaning of tourism, remembrance and war heritage as well as implications for the management of war sites elsewhere. Complementing the Normandy practitioner offerings, more scholarly investigations provide an opportunity to compare and debate what is happening in the management and interpretation at other World War II related sites of war memory, such as at Pearl Harbor, Okinawa and Portsmouth, UK. This innovative volume will be of interest to those interested in remembrance tourism, war heritage, dark tourism, battlefield tourism, commemoration, D-Day and World War II.