You can visit the house where Max Ernst lived in Huismes and Sandy Calder’s Studio in Saché. Both villages about an hour’s drive from Amboise.

Francis I, King of France, hated Charles V of Austria, The Holy Roman Emperor, with every fibre of his being. He hated him even more after 1525 following the disastrous (for Francis) Battle of Pavia when a crowing Charles locked Francis in prison.

It’s a year now since French chanteuse Denise Le Brun took her final curtain and joined her friends, Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel and Marcel Marceau in Showbiz Heaven.

A Photographic exhibition by Mark Playle

Catherine, painted as the wicked witch of the west by some biographers, was loved by her daughters Elisabeth and Claude, her son-in-law Charles (Claude’s husband) her sister-in-law Marguerite, Diane of France (Henry II’s illegitimate daughter) and Christine her beloved grand-daughter.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Tribute.

Leonardo da Vinci and Renaissance perfume.

In 1912, visiting a relative in Tours, François Coty, the perfume man, fell in love with the Loire Valley.