In Tuscany - Hardcover

Mayes, Frances

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0091878047 ISBN 13: 9780091878047

Publisher: Ebury Press, 2000

Synopsis

Frances Mayes became a worldwide bestselling author with her wonderfully evocative books, Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany. With these books, her readers were drawn into a magical world where two intrepid travellers came to a region in Italy, fell in love with it and did what we all dream of. They brought and renovated a splendid Tuscan house and the book chronicles the trials, the tribulations, the joys and disappointments of becoming Tuscan. In this book, with its superb photography by award-winning photographer Bob Krist, the reader can, for the first time, see what the house garden, surrounding countryside markets and friends really look like. With text equally as captivating a the original books, this is essential reading for every Mayes's fan.

About this title

Review:

San Francisco writer Frances Mayes told her own story in Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, her first two books on the beginning of her life in Tuscany. With building works now complete at the rundown villa known as Bramasole, Mayes steps out of the idyllic house on a hill and into the countryside, no longer the tourist.

With In Tuscany Mayes has come much closer to creating the proper distance from her subjects while offering intimate observation. The book's format is a pleasant mixture of a picture book, cookbook, travel guide and journal and the result is an astute sense of what friends, when they visit, must want her to reveal.

It is not all tourism, by any means, and the still-laboured "me" factor continues to have a presence in the essays: "I continue to be amazed that I can feel both so at home and, simultaneously, that I've just arrived. Will I always be new? I've come to think so".

The essays, which move by chapter from Kisses to the Plaza, Festivals, Countryside, Kitchen and Beauty, give Mayes a hub for the stories she tells, inserting recipes and helpful tourist information along the path. Here, she works the best of her not insubstantial abilities to the advantage of her subjects. For those following the Bramasole saga, husband Edward, a poet, pens a lovely essay on the olive harvest.

Photojournalist Bob Krist brings intimacy to the landscape and village images that are paired beautifully with the text so that whether or not it is true, there is a sense of seeing the people in the stories Mayes has created in Tuscany.

It is an unexpected departure from the serial travels and travails of this genre. Those who were put off by the first person discovery aspects of the earlier books should take a second look. --Kathleen Buckley

Review:

"Tuscany may have found its own bard in Frances Mayes."
--New York Times
"Irresistable...A senuous book for a sensuous countryside."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"An intense celebration of what she calls 'the voluptuousness of Italian life'... Appealing and very vivid... [The] book seems like the kind of thing you'd tuck into a picnic basket on an August day... or better yet, keep handy on the bedside table in the depths of January."
--New York Times Book Review
"A love letter to Italy written in precise and passionate language of near-poetic density... Maye's sequel offers something different, even richer and more complex, than her first account of life in Tuscany... This is a book to treasure, as the author so clearly treasures the life she engraves on our hearts."
--Newsday
"Frances Mayes is, before all else, a wonderful writer... She never loses sight of the fact that millenniums-old Tuscany, with its immemorial customs and folksways, is not to be domesticated or made familiar.Her Italy remains intransigently foreign, exotic, a continuing revelation of strangeness and unexpected beauties."
--Chicago Tribune"

About this edition

• Publisher: Ebury Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0091878047
• ISBN 13: 9780091878047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272