Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Frances Mayes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 2010

In this sequel to her New York Times bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, the celebrated "bard of Tuscany" (New York Times) lyrically chronicles her continuing, two decades-long love affair with Tuscany's people, art, cuisine, and lifestyle.
 
Frances Mayes offers her readers a deeply personal memoir 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 beauty and vivid pleasures of Italian life. Among the themes Mayes explores are how her experience of Tuscany dramatically expanded when she renovated and became a part-time resident of a 13th century house with a stone roof in the mountains above Cortona, how life in the mountains introduced her to a "wilder" side of Tuscany--and with it a lively  engagement with Tuscany's mountain people. Throughout, she reveals the concrete joys of life in her adopted hill town, with particular attention to life in the piazza, the art of Luca Signorelli (Renaissance painter from Cortona), and the pastoral pleasures of feasting from her garden.  Moving always toward a deeper engagement, Mayes writes of Tuscan icons that have become for her storehouses of memory, of crucible moments from which bigger ideas emerged, and of the writing life she has enjoyed in the room where Under the Tuscan Sun began.
 
With more on the pleasures of life at Bramasole, the delights and challenges of living in Italy day-to-day and favorite recipes, Every Day in Tuscany is a passionate and inviting account of the richness and complexity of Italian life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Kim Sunée Reviews Every Day in Tuscany

Kim Sunée is the author of Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home.

"The Bard of Tuscany" (New York Times) is back and better than ever. Two decades have passed since the purchase of Bramasole, Frances Mayes’s first Italian adventure into the meaning of home, made famous in Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany. In Every Day in Tuscany, her third beautifully rendered memoir, Mayes generously serves up another delicious helping. She continues to contemplate the satisfaction of a life created by one’s own hard work, but also celebrates the joys of the piazza, reminisces on her South Georgia roots, reveals her love of architecture and painting, and is especially hungry to follow the trail (which she has generously mapped out for us) of Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli.

After transforming Bramasole, you’d think that Mayes would have had enough of repairs and renovations, but she expands the idea of belonging with the purchase of a mountainside cottage. One day, as she and husband, Ed, are picking blackberries on a rugged slope above Cortona, Mayes writes of being "fatally attracted" to a "lonesome beauty," a partially collapsed stone-roof cottage. This new home becomes a place of comfort, especially when something shifts, when "one glorious summer evening at Bramasole," Mayes writes, "something unexpected intruded on this paradise."

Enchanted by the simple life, a life lived in accordance with the cycles of the sun and moon, Mayes tells her story through the seasons of a country and those of the heart. Winter is about restoring privacy, summer for reading, moonlight swims, watermelon and plum crostata. Mostly, though, the seasons are made up of days meant for being. She admires the Italians for their ease and grace of pure existence. "How do Italian friends naturally keep the jouissance they were born with?" she wonders.

Since Mayes is a poet first, her prose is infused with startling and indelible moments, and she will always inspire you to cook something. Luckily, there are recipes for everything from Melva’s Peach Pie to Risotto with White Truffles, as well as mouthwatering menus, including Roasted Garlic with Walnuts and Guinea Hen with Pancetta. Of the choreography of the kitchen, she writes, "meat glistens, lettuces float, you sneeze, I sing oh, my love, my darling, and dough rises in soft moons the size of my cupped hand as planet earth tilts us toward dinner."

People are always eating in Mayes’s world, and eating well. But good food is essential for a good life, which includes travel and the private discovery of something no less significant than a new star. On watching a couple from Milan eat a midday meal consisting of a full antipasto platter, risotto, then steaks, she writes, "Those are delicious moments for the traveler--a fine lunch with someone you love, poring over the The Blue Guide and Gambero Rosso, a weekend to explore a new place and each other."

More than anything, Every Day in Tuscany is a book for all travelers, those hungry hearts craving a lesson in living life to the fullest, whether at home or on the road. "It is paradoxical but true," she tells us, "that something that takes you out of yourself also restores you to yourself with a greater freedom.... The excitement of exploration sprang me from a life I knew how to live into a challenging space where I was forced--and overjoyed--to invent each new day."

With Mayes as our luminous North Star, we can navigate our way to a place where--if we are lucky--we will choose the road less-traveled, find our own rugged mountainside, and become part of the landscape, perhaps even find a sense of self, if not a place to call home.

From 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. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; First Edition edition (March 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767929829
• ISBN-13: 978-0767929820
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (114 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #70,008 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Frances Mayes has always adored houses, and when she saw Bramasole, a neglected, 200-year old Tuscan farmhouse nestled in five overgrown acres, it was love at first sight. Out of that instant infatuation have come four marvelous, and hugely popular, books: the bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany, In Tuscany, a collaborative photo-textbook with her husband, the poet Edward Mayes, and photographer Bob Krist, and Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy, another collaborative book with Edward Mayes and photographer Steven Rothfeld. All four highly personal books are about taking chances, living in Italy, loving and renovating an old Italian villa, the pleasures of food, wine, gardens, and the "voluptuousness of Italian life." The third book in her Tuscan trilogy, Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life (due out in spring 2010), is about Tuscan seasons and Mayes' reflections on her Italian life. She was awarded the Premio Casato Prime Donne for a major contribution in the field of letters in 2009.

Her first novel, Swan, a family saga and mystery, returns Mayes to her childhood home of Georgia and was published in 2002. A film version of Under the Tuscan Sun, starring Diane Lane, was released in fall of 2003. Frances Mayes was the editor for the 2002 Best American Travel Writing. She is also the author of the travel memoir entitled A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveller, which immediately debuted as a New York Times bestseller in 2006. Working again with Steven Rothfeld, she published Shrines: Images of Italian Worship, also in 2006.

A widely published poet and essayist, Frances Mayes has written numerous books of poetry, including Sunday in Another Country, After Such Pleasures, The Arts of Fire, Hours, The Book of Summer, and Ex Voto. Her work The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems is widely used in college poetry classes. Formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, where she directed The Poetry Center and chaired the Department of Creative Writing, Mayes now devotes herself full time to writing, restoring an historic garden and to her "At Home in Tuscany" furniture line at Drexel Heritage. She and her husband divide their time between North Carolina and Cortona, Italy.

Biographical note from Steven Barclay Agency

"Tuscany may have found its own bard in Frances Mayes."
-- The New York Times

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as good as her first book, February 22, 2010

By 

PT Cruiser "PT Cruiser" (CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life (Hardcover)

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I am a fan of Frances Mayes first book, "Under the Tuscan Sun" and thought I would really enjoy this book, but I was rather disappointed and had a lot of mixed feelings about it. The things I liked about her writing style is that she sometimes writes with a kind of flourish, lyrical and almost poetic in her descriptions. But I didn't like that this book read more like a blog more than a story of her life there. Sometimes it felt like a lot of random thoughts that didn't have much of a direction. It had a "thrown together" feel. Rather than feeling involved in the book like I did with her first one, I found it difficult to concentrate on it. It took me weeks to get through and I actually started and finished a couple other books while I was reading it.

I liked the recipes that were included and loved the idea of the Italians eating fresh and seasonally available foods. I liked her description of people eating and enjoying life rather than over analyzing everything they put in their mouths like many of us do here. She had many descriptions of simple meals that went on for hours, of food being a celebration rather than just a means of nourishment. This she conveyed well.

What I didn't like was her description of "ex-pats" and tourists in Italy which came off as being condescending. Although she has owned a home there for many years, from what I've read she lives both there and in the U.S. during different parts of the year and it seems likely that the Italians would put her in that same "ex-pat" category. The book reads like an American living in Italy not as someone who is really a part of the community.

I thought the long discussions of her trips around the country to see the art of Luca Signorelli were just plain tedious. Perhaps including photos of his works would have made it more interesting but her descriptions weren't enough to hold my interest and instead of drawing me in, my mind just wandered. I would rather have read more about the different towns, many of which I've visited, and gotten more of an insider's view rather than the tourist's view that she provided.

I loved her descriptions of her grandson Willie's experiences when he came to visit. You could feel her love for him in her writing and had an idea of his amazement with Italy as seen through a child's eyes. I could also feel her sense of loss when his vacation was over and he had to leave.

If I could have given the book 2 ½ stars, that would have been my rating, but giving the book the benefit of the doubt I'm giving it 3. I really wanted to like this book more than I did.

50 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a Leisurely and Loving Stroll Though Tuscany with Frances Mayes, February 26, 2010

By 

Alan L. Chase "Al Chase" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life (Hardcover)

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Almost twenty years ago, the publication of Frances Mayes' "Under the Tuscan Sun" signaled the dawn of a new era in the perennial love affair between American travelers and all things Tuscan. This month, she continues her string of fascinating memoirs with "Every Day in Tuscany - Seasons of An Italian Life."

I am one of those Americans who has fallen under the spell of Tuscany - Firenze, Siena, Chianti, the Ponte Vecchio, the three versions of Michelangelo's David that can be found within Florence, the Duoma, the Uffizi. I absorbed the sights, sounds and flavors of this book with great gusto. If, after reading Mayes' latest offering, you are not tempted to book a trip to Italy this summer, then I will be surprised.

The structure of this latest memoir is set between the bookends of Mayes' arrival with her poet husband, Ed, in Cortona for their annual season in Tuscany at her beloved villa of Bramasole and their departure for their winter home in North Carolina. In her chronicling of the intervening months, she leads her readers down a leisurely path that introduces them to some of the colorful characters in town, her life-embracing neighbors, the kitchens of some of the best cooks in the world, and the vineyards and olive groves of the surrounding hillside towns.

Another thread that weaves together her meandering narratives is her love for the paintings of Luca Signorelli. She and Ed visit many Tuscan towns to have another look at some of her favorite Signorelli paintings and frescoes. Spicing up the pages of each chapter are recipes that Mayes has gleaned from treasured Italian friends, and words and phrases from the colorful Italian language. Her use of these phrases is wonderfully instructive, rather than intrusive.

She describes in loving detail some wonderful places I look forward to visiting - townsal like Urbino, Citta di Castello, Sansepolchro, Umbertide, Perugia.

When she first made the investment in the crumbling Bramasole, Mayes was regrouping after a divorce. The town folks embraced her - but cautiously. Along the way, there have been occasional indications that she was still viewed as an outsider. But the anecdotes she shares in this latest memoir make it clear that as a byproduct of her investment in the community of Cortona - and in her serving an evangelist for the ethos and frame of mind that is Tuscany - the Tuscans have now embraced her wholeheartedly as a valued member of the community and family. She describes the subtle growth and evolution of her own mind set about Tuscany - its people, its foods, its wines, its history, its joys and challenges.

This book is a total delight - like a warm and comforting taste of freshly pressed extra virgin olive oil. I encourage you to read it if you love Tuscany - or are open to being seduced by its multi-sensory beauty and charming homeliness.

Enjoy.

Abbondanza!

Al

51 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Tuscany: The Every Day Blog, February 6, 2010

By 

Daniel G. Lebryk (Chicago) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life (Hardcover)

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Many people will adore this book. Those people are attracted by Mayes previous books; they fell in love with them, and dream of having her life. This book is a voyeuristic sequel to the first two; the adoring reader can now live out the fantasy of 'every day' of Frances Mayes' life in Tuscany.

For the uninitiated or the less star struck, this book is the equivalent of a rambling blog, random thoughts, observations, and events that Frances Mayes has strewn together.

Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life, tries to be many things. The book tries hard to be a story, a travel guide, a recounting of the author's personal trials and tribulations, a cook book, an Italian language course, and art history. Sadly it doesn't do a particularly good job at any of these tasks. It even fails at recounting the passage of time and seasons.

The title hints at a romantic view of life in utopian small town Italy. I expected some insight into Italian life and culture, or at least a small thread of story to weave that fabric of all things Italian. Instead the book is a rambling series of paragraphs disconnected from one another. Interesting stories are started and never finished. People come and go, flow in and out of the book for no apparent reason, except that Frances Mayes met them and finds them interesting for a moment. Italian artists, towns, and areas are all mentioned with the expectation that the reader knows these things, or that they are simply common knowledge. Recipes are presented willy nilly, some are fabulous, some are impossible to make. At first the recipes are described in incredible detail, gradually they become vague descriptions, and then finally they devolve into restaurant menus. The book attempts to be an Italian language course, Ms. Mayes has an annoying habit of including Italian phrases in italics and then translating them into English after a comma. This artifact is cute early in the book, but becomes annoying as the book wears on.

The great news for the Mayes fan, she uses so many towns and street names, the rabid fan can actually follow her everyday life around central and northern Italy. They can probably even locate the carefully built and heated pizza oven in her backyard, or the enormous rock table lovingly built during the bocce terrain construction, or the man wearing the wife beater t-shirt near the tranquil piazza, or the apartment floor that looks like a yacht deck in Portofino, or some minute detail of a painting by Signorelli. All these details were mentioned in the book, but none were given context, or story, or a life that had any meaning to me. They were random things that I was supposed to understand and adore.

The book turned a particularly bad corner for me during a diatribe about `ex-pats,' or foreign tourists invading the private world of Frances Mayes and her husband Ed. She describes how the `ex-pats' arrive, don't speak Italian but insist on speaking loudly in English, don't work hard with their own hands, spend too much money, and have no Italian friends. Based on what Ms. Mayes has written in this book it is very difficult to swallow her disdain for tourists. She and her husband purchased two houses that no Italian would buy. They then hired people to do the renovation. Her Italian friends mostly appear to be people with something to sell to her, from the wine merchant to the various chefs. She may well speak Italian, and that seems to be the only difference between her and the tourists. Frances Mayes has exactly one job, to be entertained every day.

Good literature engages my imagination, transports me to another place, and excites me to read every word the author has written. Very subtly, it parades the questions in front of me without answering those questions. This book is very far from that type of literature. Instead this book is many pages of the musings of a ne'er do well that is on eternal vacation. I was never engaged even when she described places I know well.