The Most Beautiful Villages of Brittany

I bought this book for my wife to help us prepare for a trip to Brittany. I didn't know quite what to expect; would this be just another travel book with beautiful photos taken by professionals with high-end cameras? Would it set us up, or inform us? I am not interested in photos of places that I can never visit, because the photographs have been retouched or were taken on the penultimate day, at the exact moment when the scene was perfect. Most travel books have photos like that, and they are a waste of money to me because that beautiful mountain, lake, church, or winding road will not be what I see, even if I'm standing where the photographer stood. Well, all such angst aside I'm happy to report that Brittany is as beautiful as the pictures in this book! We were, I am happy to report, informed about Brittany, not set up. We were made ready, our senses honed, our hearts opened to the right pitch. Brittany is as beautiful as these photos lead one to believe. Our hope was not in vain! So I heartily recommend this book for travelers who are preparing to go to Brittany, and I commend the work that went into the book: my travel hat is off to Hugh Palmer and James Bentley. Good work, guys! Ok, your camera is better'n mine, but rather than using it to deceive me, you've used it to raise my consciousness. Thank you!

This is a beautiful full-color coffee table book of photography with text. Brittany is the northwest region of France, much of it being coastal, which makes fishing the primary occupation of its inhabitants. As a coffee table book - just for flipping through the photographs - it's gorgeous. As a travel guide, it has plenty of useful information with the downside that the book is very large and heavy to be carrying around or packing in a suitcase. But as reading material, the text is mostly very boring. There is a little info on local history and culture (especially in the introductory chapter), but mainly it's just the same architectural details over and over. For instance, "the church's beautiful 16th-century painted reredos" 16 times (each for a different village), or "the medieval half-timbered houses on the main street" 27 times. (I'm just making up the numbers to give you an idea of what the book is like.) I took a star away for the boring text - otherwise the book would rate 5 stars. The entire book has a strong emphasis on Medieval and Renaissance architecture, which gives even the lovely photographs a kind of sameness after you've been looking at them for awhile. I would like to have seen more variety in them, such as photos of traditional musical instruments, foods (there are a couple of these in the introduction, but that is all), traditional clothing, gardens, natural features, and interiors of homes. And especially, many more photos of the prehistoric monuments for which the region is famous (there are only one or two in the book.) The photographer clearly went to considerable effort to avoid having any people in most of his pictures, but I think that having people in them would make them much livelier. Particularly pictures of people that would portray the culture of Brittany, such as fishermen at work, folk dancers in costume, crowds at markets and fairs, musicians performing, priests in the churches, etc. I also wish that the book included a glossary with drawings to illustrate architectural jargon. Most of us are not familiar with all those terms for medieval church architecture. I was frustrated at first that there was no map so that I could see where the villages are located, but eventually I did find one at the back in a section titled "Useful Information," which also contains a nice Travel Guide and Bibliography. (201 pages)

We will be going to brittany this summer. What a preview this book offers. I am making my travel plans based on the gorgeous photographs and descriptions. A treasure to keep long after seing the places, or also to dream of places where time seems to have stopped.

Speaking as a native New Englander, I feel like I've seen enough terrific-looking towns that I can appreciate a really beautiful village. The ones photographed in this book are spectacular. This really is a great coffee table book. The colors in the photos just draw the eye in. It's hard to describe... You will see a whole village of ancient stone buildings, with rock walls in a sort of dusky brown, and suddenly, off to the side, a brightly colored painted boat. Or maybe just a little flower garden, with lots of little Manet-esque red blossoms. And the architecture, or course, is uniformly, yet diversely, amazing. Roman, medieval, and (slightly) more modern, it all just fits together so beautifully. Furthermore, the whole book is full of cool little articles talking about historically interesting tidbits of history, legend, etc. from the region.Also -- if anyone who enjoys this book has reading ability in French, I'd like to recommend "La Langue Gauloise", by P.Y. Lambert. It talks about the original language of France, "Gaulish", an early Celtic tongue, from before the days of Caesar and friends. I think that one of the intriguing things about Brittany is that this original, pre-Romance-languages tongue of the region was largely reinstated, in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., by Celtic-speaking refugees when Britain was being overrun by the Germanic-speaking Angles and Saxons. I think it's interesting to look at the place names in Brittany, and try to learn whether they were named back in prehistoric times, or in the era since the 5th and 6th century. This is the kind of question that this book raises -- the concatenated sense of sedimentary century laid upon century, laid upon century, is absolutely enthralling.

This book is one in a series of "The Most Beautiful Villages of...". Although they all have different authors the photography is exceptional. The book concentrates on four areas and the villages that make up each area. There is a short history of each region as well as interesting information on the villages and captions on the photos. In my opinion it is the photographs that give this book five stars. It is a wonderful "coffee table" book to own.