Customer Reviews

The Lady in the Palazzo: An Umbrian Love Story

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. However, to maximize your enjoyment, you should read De Blasi's A Thousand Days in Venice first to fall in love with her and her Venetian banker. That book is one of my favorite books I've read in the past 10 years--especially if you like travel, Italy, are a bit of a romantic, enjoy reading about someone's life that equals any good fiction. She and her banker are an original and live adventurously, and you get to travel along with them in their minds which is a treat.

Once you've read A Thousand Days in Venice, which has the central conflict of the Venetian banker meeting her and courting her, which is a delicious plot, then you'll enjoy A Thousand Days in Tuscany and this narrative on their home in Umbria. It's really a trilogy, and best if you meet them first in Venice. To jump into this book without the preceding ones might be off-putting unless you're an Italianophile or a chef or love Umbria. One needs the first introductions to properly fall in love. The evolution of their relationship and life is what draws you in and helps you enjoy the subtle magic. I just bought her book on Siciliy today and will enjoy a visit with them there. Go to Venice first, then Tuscany, then Umbria with this enchanting couple!

"The Lady in the Palazzo" is a love story: love of life, of good food and wine, but mostly love of people. The main story line of finding ( and eventually moving into) a home in Umbria is a device that allows Ms. De Blasi to expose the wonderful textured lives of the characters in her book. In addition to being a fine chef she is a keen observer of life and takes us on a wonderful journey as her story unfolds....in short , this is a wonderful, sweet book that anyone who loves all things Italian will enjoy immensely...
P.S. This was given to me by my Italian chef wife at our home in Italy where we reside 6 months a year.....some of the people in this book remind us of friends.

Everything di Blasi writes is wonderful if you like food and have a genuine desire to know what it's like to become part of the places where she and her blueberry-eyed Venetian husband, Fernando, travel. They worm their way into the bosom of each community in which they live (one per book), making friends, making a new home, and cooking whatever is fresh and ready to become a mouth-watering lunch or dinner. I highly recommend each of her books, of which this is the fourth. They can be read out of order but I think the reader will get more out of them if they're read in chronological order.

The author has entranced by wife and me from Venice to Tuscany and now to her home in Umbria.
Her command of the English language makes us run for a dictionary from time to time, but her use of unusual words is always expressing a thought with a diiferent perspective.
We have found her writing so lyrical (in fairness,some sentences over three volumes could be re-written) that we read some paragraphs of her book each morning and look forward to hearing her words again.

She has been a professional chef, and spent years writing about the foods of diifferent European regions. Her description of the foods, with recipies of the area intersticed from time to time, has cause us to join her on her venture through Italy. We have made some of the dishes as we have read the books. A rare way to share the flavor of a writer's experiences.

Marlena lets us see the Umbrian culture, the Umbrian cunning, and the joy of befriending folks from a maid turned restaurant owner to the local marchese. This is always a love story of a lady who found romance after she raised her children. A lady who dared to walk from a comfortable safe life to a daring new one. New in language, new in customs, new in expectations by her and her new countrymen. Delightful reading!

...and was sad when it was finished. I've read all her books and this one is my favorite. After spending some time in Orvieto and the surrounding countryside, I could easily picture everything she described. My favorite part is about the ripeness of the melon she buys at the market: this is quintessential Italian life.

I have just finished reading The Lady in the Palazzo -- At Home in Umbria. This is my first encounter with the American writer Marlena De Blasi who now makes her life in Italy. She lives here in a different world and language, almost as she says, it's like living life new again as a ten year old. This is not the kind of book I would normally read. It was my wife that put this book into my hands.
My wife is in the US Foreign Service; she is presently assigned to the US Embassy in Rome. I am a retired clergyman and college administrator. We have visited Orvieto a number of times, staying at one of its charming hotels close to the Duomo.
Marlena's Lady in the Palazzo opened a door into Italian life that even the opportunities possible to life in the Foreign Service, though well beyond that of a tourist, still does not allow. To have visited Orvieto where Marlena and her husband Fernando live, recognizing in her telling the same streets and shops and merchants, was a special pleasure.
What was more important, however, were the marvelous insights into the human factor -- how people live, how they think and feel. Marlena by virtue of who she is was a challenge to an established culture which we came to understand more clearly as it was carefully explained by Fernando. Yet she was a loving and caring disruption to old and established ways even to the surprise and joy of Fernando.
People changed; some like Neddo and his lifelong enemy, Il Marchese Edgardo d'Onofrio, both found the opportunity for a second chance because of Marlena. The life stories shared with Marlena by her new friends and then she with us were moving. How easy it was to love Miranda and Barlozzo. The survival story of Tilde who claims "all of us are made by a single event" forced me to put down the book and struggle with that thought. If that is so, what was that single event that made me? I may have found it. Not sure.
How special it was to learn that Etruscans collected their tears in little vases believing that tears were the "melting of the soul." Into these little vases they added crushed violets and rose petals to create perfumes with which they anointed their loved ones, "thus giving up their soul for love."

The Lady in the Palazzo is a special book, sensitive and beautifully crafted. By looking into the lives of others and into her own struggle Marlena holds a mirror for us to see ourselves more clearly too. She offers much wisdom like "Once in a while, let life shape itself."
Robert Odean

Marlena de Blasi really captures the atmosphere in old haughty Orvieto. Her description of the Orvieto market is also spot on.

Great evolution from Venice to Tuscany. Looking for that perfect place, the writer tells so much about the real life of the real people, and her involvement in trying to cope with love, tragedy, and hope.

The book is like a delicious dessert, you read it slowly, loving every chapter, never wanting it to end.

Marlena de Blasi is a joy to read, her experiences and writing are full of a love of life. To enjoy it the most, it's best to read the others first, or at least the first one set in Venice. What's even more wondrous is these stories are actually true - wouldn't we all love to have Marlena as a chef and tour guide?!