One of the functions of Louis XIV's Versailles was to provide a setting for the receptions of ambassadors, heads of state, and other visiting dignitaries who conducted diplomatic and political business with France. These activities became particularly important after Versailles was proclaimed the new seat of the monarchy and government in 1682."Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles Under Louis XIV" is the first book to examine how the vast gardens of Versailles were used for these diplomatic receptions during the reign of the Sun King (1661-1715). The gardens were the final mise en scene of an elaborate ritual, which included the housing of the foreigners in Paris, their journey to Versailles, and their official audience with the king in the palace. A showcase for the achievements of royal artists, landscape architects, and hydraulic engineers, the gardens were soon regarded as one of the wonders of the modern world, proclaiming the wealth, power, and artistic taste of France and the French monarchy.The diplomatic tours were programmed every step of the way, with trained guides leading their guests on prescribed itineraries. Beginning in 1689, the king himself drafted a series of comprehensive itineraries, collectively called the "Maniere de montrer les jardins de Versailles," for the use of his guides (a newly discovered version of the "Maniere" appears for the first time in this book). These itineraries changed over the years in concert with modifications and additions to the gardens, attesting to a constant search for an ideal itinerary--a subtheme of "Diplomatic Tours."

GUY DE MAUPASSANT, the master of the nineteenth-century French short story, visited Sicily in the spring of 1885 and wrote his travel memoir as a tribute to the art, architecture, people and landscape of this Mediterranean island. He provides a vivid account of this "strange and divine museum of architecture," where Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Norman influences combine to produce monuments of beauty and a unique Sicilian style. In a land then little touched by modern transportation, with and without guides, he traveled by train, boat, horse and foot to reach the places he had set out to see: Palermo and the great cathedral of Monreale; the ancient Greek sites of Segesta, Selinunte and Agrigento; Messina and the Aeolian Islands; Catania, Taormina, Syracuse. Maupassant climbs to the top of Vulcano, Mount Etna, and the fortified monastery on Monte Cuccio, and down into the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo and the sulphur mines of Casteltermini. He visits many places that had special aesthetic and poetic importance for him, like the Archaeological Museum of Syracuse and its famous statue of Venus and in Palermo both the Palatine Chapel and Wagner's room in the Hotel des Palmes where the composer wrote the final notes of his last opera, Parsifal. Sicily is edited and translated by Robert W. Berger, an art historian who has published extensively on French art and architecture and on the history of Paris. Introduction, notes, bibliography, map. 25 engravings and photographs. Historical Travel, Paperback.

"In Old Paris" presents five descriptions of the city from 1323 to 1790. These include A Treatise of the Praises of Paris by Jean de Jandun (1323), The Description of the City of Paris by Guillebert de Mets (1407-34), A Description of Paris by the Venetian Ambassador's Secretary (1577-79), Giovanni Paolo Marana's Pleasant Critique of Paris (1692) and Letters from Paris by the Russian traveller Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1790). Paris was changed forever by the upheaval of the French Revolution during the last decade of the eighteenth century and by the physical transformation of the city in the mid-nineteenth. Old Paris does survive, however, in many of its architectural monuments and also in these fascinating urban descriptions by residents of, and visitors to, the city. This volume includes a select bibliography on Parisian history, urbanism and architecture; an architectural gazetteer; an appendix on the size and population of Paris from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century; a glossary, and an index.