David Downie
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David Downie (born San Francisco, 1958) is a multilingual Paris-based American author and journalist who writes most often about culture, food and travel.
A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, David Downie took a master’s degree in Italian from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was a University Fellow. After working in the early 1980s as a translator, interpreter and press officer in Milan, he moved to Paris. His often amusing, irreverent articles, essays and books reflect an abiding interest in French and Italian culture, food and language.
Downie’s articles have appeared in about 100 publications, print and online, including The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Bon Appétit, Gourmet magazine, Gastronomica, The Art of Eating, Australian Financial Review, Departures, Salon.com, Epicurious.com and Concierge.com. He has acted as Paris correspondent, contributing editor or European editor for a number of publications, including Appellation and Art & Antiques. His writing has also appeared in anthologies, among them The Collected Traveler volumes on Paris, Southwest France and Central Italy; Salon.com’s Wanderlust; Travelers’ Tales: Adventures in Wine Country; and Lonely Planet’s By The Seat of My Pants.
In 1997 Downie’s crime novel La tour de l’immonde, about violence and murder in central Paris and its banlieue, was published in Paris.
David Downie’s first nonfiction book in English, Enchanted Liguria: A Celebration of the Culture, Lifestyle and Food of the Italian Riviera also appeared in 1997; it was translated the following year in Italy under the title La Liguria incantata and remains a reference book on Liguria's gastronomy. His illustrated book (with photography by Alison Harris) on the contemporary cooking of Rome, Cooking the Roman Way: Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks and Trattorias of Rome, earned a red-star review in Publishers Weekly and was listed among the top ten cookbooks of 2002 by The Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle.
Downie’s latest and critically acclaimed book is Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light (2005).[1] Evocative and allusive text guides the reader to varied and sometimes almost-forgotten treasures of Paris, from the Ile Saint-Louis to Les Halles and the parks of Montsouris and Buttes Chaumont. The book explores people as well as places, with unexpected insights on Georges Pompidou, François Mitterrand and Coco Chanel.
European Pilgrimage routes are a newer field of interest for Downie. In 2006, together with his wife, photographer Alison Harris, he walked 1,100 kilometers across France following sections of the Way of Saint James; the website that documents this journey already exists,[2] and Downie is now writing a book about it, to be published in winter 2007.
[edit] Works
- 1995: Un’altra Parigi, nove passeggiate insolite nella Ville Lumière (with Ulderico Munzi)
- 1995: The Irreverent Guide to Amsterdam
- 1997: Enchanted Liguria: A Celebration of the Culture, Lifestyle and Food of the Italian Riviera (Rizzoli International)
- Italian translation, 1998: La Liguria incantata: Cultura, stile di vita, cucina della Riviera ligure. Translated by Camilla Orlando (SAGEP, Genoa. ISBN 88-7058-699-5)
- 1997: La tour de l’immonde
- 2002: Cooking the Roman Way: Authentic recipes from the home cooks and trattorias of Rome (HarperCollins)
- 2005: Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light (Transatlantic Press)
[edit] Notes
- ^ British travel writer Jan Morris called Paris, Paris "possibly the most evocative American book about Paris since A Moveable Feast.
- ^ Paris Pilgrim
