Normalisation

Hello,
I am relatively new to database design but think I understand most of the basics but would appreciate some clarification on a few points. I have just been lumbered with what I believe an extremely inefficient and badly designed database and would like to improve in the most logical way.

-Is it always preferable to fully normalise a database?
For example, if the table held people, it could contain the house, town, country, continent that this person belonged to. At the moment the database I'm dealing with has all of these things contained in the 'people' table, and stored as text, not as a foriegn key linked to another table, which is obviously not an ideal approach and not normalised at all. In a fully normalised database, all these attributes should have their own table I.e., one for house, town etc.

Now to run a query to find out all the people who lived in Europe, I would have to join all these tables together I.e. person to house, house to town, town to country, country to continent. This seems logical but perhaps a bit long winded. If this was a common query, would I solve this situation by creating a 'view' in the database? I've also read about stored queries, but from it seems the consensus now is that these are to be avoided as it mixes business logic with database management creating a brittle system that is difficult to evolve. Wouldn't a 'view' pose a similar problem though? I could write everything in the application, but wouldn't this slow queries down?


I really appriciate the effort you guys put into answering all the questions posted here, thanks! My other questions are in different posts so that answers are only related to one subject.