Blue Guide Burgundy

Rating:
Summary: The Guide to the Burgundy of Your Dreams
Review: My family followed this book to our dream vacation in the French countryside, driving through Burgundy's luscious scenery to ancient villages, towns and castles, and country churches and chateaux. For the cultural traveler, this book (as are all of the Blue Guides) is close to exhaustive. It extensively covers the architecture, art objects and history of apparently every site in Burgundy, with town maps and floor plans of important churches. It is arranged in tours, which take you up streets and into delightful nooks and crannies and courtyards you'd never find on your own in less than a hundred years of looking. In the countryside, it'll take you along luscious quiet roads, through fields and pastures, and along canals and rivers into lovely towns where most tourists just don't go. Ian Ousby seems to have visited every stretch of countryside, every city, town and hamlet, and every country church, every old bridge, castle, abbey, provincial museum or archeological site in Burgundy and to have detailed everything noteworthy about it in this book, accurately. You won't miss anything, and you won't often wonder what it is you're looking at. He includes particulars like the programs of the sculpture of the great Romanesque carved churches and the stained glass in the Gothic cathedrals.

The book is a bit dry, and laconic in its praises (when he highlights something with an asterisk or two, you'll come to realize that he isn't kidding), so you'll more often be pleasantly surprised when you arrive somewhere than let down. The tours are superb, and run through bewitchingly beautiful countryside, although you may have trouble covering all of the territory in one day if you're one of those people who likes to stop and see everything, and to take your time soaking in the feel of the locale. (If you are one of those people, buy this book and go to Burgundy with it and you'll have a lovely time.) Sometimes you may just have to sit down in the shade of an old tree in a quiet square in front of an old church somewhere, and listen to the fountain splashing and the swallows twittering overhead for a while before you get going again. The directions are excellent but can be involved, so don't try and drive and follow them at the same time: plan your trip ahead, get maps, and take the time to outline your routes in advance, so you'll be able to relax and enjoy yourself while you travel. For some people the details may be overwhelming; if you don't care much about art or history and you travel mostly to visit resorts, play golf and go shopping, you would probably want to go somewhere else, anyway, and will not find this book of much interest.