Journal
The customs, the works, the films and the places that make European culture. By the Novars editors.
Forty-eight hours on Lake Como
Villas with terraced gardens, varnished wooden boats, nineteenth-century hotels and a light painters chased for two centuries: a weekend on the most elegant of the Italian lakes.
Tu or vous: who suggests it, and when
It is one of the most baffling features of the French language. The default rule, who proposes the switch, and the circles that are exceptions: everything you need never to...
The secrets of the Hermès carré
Ninety centimetres square, silk printed in Lyon, edges hand-rolled: since 1937, the carré has become far more than a scarf. The story of a cult object.
The theft that made the Mona Lisa famous
One August morning in 1911, an Italian glazier took the painting off the wall and walked out with it hidden under his smock. For more than two years the whole...
Contempt and the Villa Malaparte, a house made for cinema
A red house perched on a rock in Capri, a staircase climbing to the sky, Brigitte Bardot on the roof: in 1963, Godard filmed one of the most extraordinary houses...
The Riva, the most elegant boat in the world
A mahogany hull varnished like a piano, leather seats, a boatyard on the shore of an Italian lake and a clientele of stars: how a motorboat became a symbol of...
The hand kiss: history and rules of a rare gesture
We think of it as old-fashioned, yet it still fascinates. The lips never touch the hand, it is never done in the street, and it cannot be improvised: what you...
The trench coat, from the trenches to Paris
Born for the officers of the Great War, adopted by Bogart, Audrey Hepburn and generations of Parisian women: the story of the most timeless coat in the wardrobe.
The legendary cinemas of Paris
A neo-Egyptian palace in Barbès, an Art Deco auditorium of nearly three thousand seats, a little Latin Quarter cinema showing classics since 1938: Paris is the city of the silver...
The Orient Express, a palace on rails
A Belgian engineer’s dream, a line between Paris and Constantinople, an Agatha Christie novel and restored Art Deco carriages: the story of the most famous train in the world.
Champagne: the rules of the art
A sigh rather than a bang, the right temperature, flute or coupe, and the story of a monk who did not quite invent the bubbles: serving and drinking champagne like...