Every Day In Tuscany
Seasons of a Italian Life
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Twenty years ago Frances Mayes, having ended a long marriage and begun a new relationship, was travelling in Italy and happened upon an abandoned, grand but dilapidated three-storey house called ‘Bramasole’ just outside the Tuscan hillside of Cortona. Mayes fell immediately in love with the house and eventually bought it and began a long and arduous restoration of it. The process of making Bramasole her home - and simultaneously of establishing a new life (and a new outlook on life) in Italy - were the subjects of her bestselling memoirs UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN and BELLA TUSCANY. In the decade since BELLA TUSCANY was published, Mayes has gone from being a proud resident of Cortona to one of its most esteemed citizens as well as Tuscany’s literary doyenne. Her books are endlessly devoured and discussed by book groups, her speaking engagements and readings are mobbed, and Bramasole’s gates receive daily visits from fans from around the world. In this new memoir Mayes offers her readers another deeply personal account of her present-day life in Tuscany, encompassing both the changes she has experienced since UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN and BELLA TUSCANY appeared, and sensuous, evocative reflections on the timeless, unchanging beauty and simple pleasures of Italian life. Among the themes Mayes examines are how her life in the mountains introduced her to a ‘wilder’ side of Tuscany and with it a new scale of engagement among Tuscany’s mountain people. Throughout she thoughtfully muses on the many concrete joys of building an Italian life: Tuscan icons that connect with her life and have become for her storehouses of memory; crucible moments from which bigger ideas have emerged; how a significant part of her adjustment to Italian metabolism has awakened her to the possibilities in spontaneity and trust in instinc t; and reflections on the writing life she has enjoyed in the room where UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN began and on the wider view she’s gained since then.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her most recent Tuscan tour, Mayes conducts readers through the gentle and sometimes violent and disruptive undulations of the seasons from winter to summer in her Tuscan home of Bramasole. In this new memoir, she reflects on the palpable scents emitted by the old-growth chestnut, apple, and olive trees, the jovial hospitality and strength of her friends and neighbors, and the familiar and sometimes disturbing sounds of herds of wild boars rushing through the orchards. Mayes and her husband, Ed, situated themselves even more firmly in Tuscany a few years ago when they discovered a falling-down stone cottage on a rugged slope and restored it as a second home. We follow Mayes as she forages for the prized amarini, cherries the size of five-caret rubies, which are bottled with alcohol and brought out in winter to spoon over polenta cake, pears, blackberries, asparagus, fennel flowers, and figs. We continue on our journey with her as she leads us in search of the great Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli from Cortona, where her new house lies. Mayes s affectionate and warm memoir vividly celebrates the lush abundance and charm of daily life in the Italian countryside.