Tired of laboring in city cubicles, Justine van der Leun sublets her studio apartment, leaves her magazine job, and moves to Collelungo, Italy, population: 200. There, in the ancient city center of a historic Umbrian village, she sets up house with the handsome local gardener she met on vacation only weeks earlier. This impulsive decision launches an eye-opening series of misadventures when village life and romance turn out to be radically different from what she had imagined. Love lost with the gardener is found instead with Marcus, an abandoned English pointer that she rescues. With Marcus by her side, Justine discovers the bliss and hardship of living in the countryside: herding sheep, tending to wild horses, picking olives with her adopted Italian family, and trying her best to learn the regional dialect. Not quite up to wild boar hunting, no good at gathering mushrooms, and no mamma when it comes to making pasta, she never quite fits in with the locals who, despite their differences, take her in as one of their own. The result is a rich, comic, and unconventional portrait about learning to live and love in the most unexpected ways.
Marcus of Umbria
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A sweet, disarming story finds a young New York editor venturing to Italy to pursue romance with a sexy gardener and ending up falling for a neglected dog instead. In her straightforward, unembellished prose, Van der Leun recounts how she shucked her job editing the Letters page for an unidentified lifestyle magazine because she wasn't good at getting along with the other grasping workers, broke up with a perfect modern man who was also Mr. Boring, and spent a summer month at an acquaintance's house in Collelungo, a sheep-farming village of 200 souls in Umbria. There she met one of the town's sons, the handsome, earnest gardener Emanuele, whose entire hard-working, ample-eating, non-English-speaking family she grew to know and love over the year she returned to live in the town. But she was appalled by the younger brother's treatment of his animals, specifically the dogs he used for hunting, and nursed to health a sadly starving young English pointer she named Marcus. Over the year, the relationship with Emanuele did not blossom; but Van der Leun became crazy about her sleek, dark-headed fast-running bird dog—a female, it turned out, who needed quickly to be spayed. The author manages to capture the lovely, vanishing Old World ways of these tightly knit people, while also interweaving a heart-melting tale. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Tired of her life in New York, van der Leun takes a vacation in the small town of Collelungo, in Umbria, Italy, where she falls in love with a rakish farmer named Emanuele. Soon she is back in Collelungo for good, moving in with Emanuele and his family on their sheep farm. When Justine finds an abandoned hunting dog, she promptly takes it in as her own. The dog, whom she names Marcus, becomes her constant companion around the Umbrian countryside as she observes the rituals of life on a farm, from the work of sheep herding, pig slaughtering, and horse training to the everyday rituals of family life. When her romance with Emanuele turns sour, she finds it hard to pry herself out of Italy and wonders if she can return to New York. And if her thoroughly Italian dog can survive there. Van der Leun's memoir is a funny and surprisingly tender story about culture shock, and the unwavering love of a dog. --Hilary Hatton
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating and lovely story, though more about Italian rural life than the dog Marcus,
This review is from: Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl about Love (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The protagonist of this memoir bugged me a little at first, but over time I grew to appreciate her, flaws and all. The problem was she seemed a bit callow and insensitive when she talked about her New York magazine job or desire to bed an Italian hunk, and I didn't know if I wanted to keep reading her story. The sheer escapist novelty of it all, however, drew me in, and I ended up loving her vivid and engaging depiction of her boyfriend's Italian farming family and their culture in the small Umbrian village where adult children stay close to home and often see their mothers every day. It was touching to learn more about the author's background with a single mother and to better understand her very human awkwardnesses and insecurities. I started to like her and sympathize with her, especially when she found and saved the abused dog Marcus and her relationship with her boyfriend began to fray.
I also learned a huge amount about the Italian way of life and farming practices, making ricotta, harvesting olives, training horses, and raising sheep, things I think about now when I pour olive oil on my lasagna or pass on by the lamb chops. The book is interesting, moving, funny, and a wonderful window on Umbrian rural culture, reminding me a little of James Herriot's stories. As for the emotional- memoir part, I think it might have been even more affecting if the author had revealed more about her relationship with her boyfriend (there's way more on life with his family and on the farm) and the writing work she was doing in Collelungo for an Italian businessman since almost nothing is even said about that. I felt the whole time at a bit of a distance from her and the TOTAL story, as if we were being treated magazine-style to only certain parts. I also wish there'd been more at the end about what happened to Justine and Marcus. I guess that means I'm ready for the sequel and to see more from this author!
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A CANDID REMEMBRANCE ENRICHED WITH LIFE LESSONS AND LAUGHTER,
This review is from: Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl about Love (Hardcover)
Had a bad day at the office? Justine van der Leun had more than a few plus seven years of living in New York City, and she wanted a change. When an acquaintance invited her to spend a month in his village, Collelungo, Italy, she couldn't pack fast enough. Thus began a life changing adventure for her and a warm, hilarious, head-on honest memoir for us. MARCUS OF UMBRIA will enchant from the first page. After meeting a handsome musician/gardener, Emanuele, during her first visit to Italy Justine decides to move there permanently in hopes of finding "a great love.....a new place and a new way to live." Now, Collelungo (population 200) was a new place for her but in actuality an ancient city in the heart of Umbria. The people were farmers, quite set in the ways of their predecessors and happy to follow them. Emanuele's family, the Crucianis, took her in - albeit they found her odd. For her part, Justine attempted to adapt,, helping where she could, gamely following their habits, and attempting to learn the language. But she found that much of the fabric of life for the Collelungoese had been woven centuries ago and she could not change a stitch "This was a culture of women who took care of men from birth to death, and of men who feigned incapability until they actually became incapable." (ie Justine once saw an aged woman carefully making her way across the piazza carrying a stack of starched and ironed shirts - after all, "she had been ironing her son's shirts for seventy-five years.") Justine found herself "unable or unwilling to do what society dictates an Umbrian woman should do - including incessantly cleaning up after a man, killing chickens with my bare hands, and cooking lasagna and wild boar." However, in addition to finding that she and Emanuele were not meant for each other Justine did find the love of her life to date in a small pen attached to the horse barn - a badly neglected puppy whose ribs she could easily count. She immediately made him her own and named him Marcus. As it turned out he was a she and a purebred English pointer. Caring for Marcus in a place where dogs were treated as livestock and often died by the age of three. Nonetheless, she persisted much to the consternation of the Cruciani family. Speaking of that family, the author has created unforgettably vivid verbal photographs. It is as if her words were a camera clearly imaging mother Serenella (who worked 14 hours a day and then came home to prepare a feast in 20 minutes); father Fabio with his ever present cigar who is usually found in a seated position, Emanuele's siblings and diverse relatives. Hopefully some day MARCUS OF UMBRIA will become a film as these people are too wonderful not to be brought to mind again on a wide screen. Justine van der Leun has given us a memoir to savor, a sampling of the Old World vis-a-vis the new, a candid remembrance enriched with life lessons, laughter, and the ever changing faces of love. Gail Cooke
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fun culture clash about love and family in Italy - but not really about the dog,
By Jill Florio "Reuse, reduce, recycle!" (Verde Valley, Arizona) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl about Love (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This charming memoir takes us through American-girl Justine's eyes after she spontaneously moves in with her new Italian lover and his farming family in rural Umbria. We see how very different family life is within the confines of an unfamiliar culture, far from home.
The author pokes gentle fun at her cultural clashes, yet also pierces through the romantic veil we all might harbor of becoming an ex-pat in some dreamy hilly Italian town. Instead, we see what life is really like in a depressed country region where domestic animals are sorely neglected and Italian babies are fetishized. Marcus of Umbria not the Tuscan fantasy of other tales. Justine rolls with the punches, rarely pulling the Ugly American card. She realizes she is an outsider, but that she is at least one that is largely amusedly tolerated by her adopted family/community. Where she doesn't mesh at all is in her relationship with the animals of Umbria. If in Italy babies become fetish objects, in the United States we dote on our dogs to an extent that confounds and rather appalls the Italians. By the time Justine realizes she's more in love with the sweet little pointer she's rescued than her actual lover, it's clear that she needs to return home. This memoir was a pleasant, swift read,perfect for relaxing at the end of a long day. There aren't any serious crises in the narrative. It's a nice little travelogue about rural Italian life. Unfortunately the book is marketed as a dog story. It's really not. Eponymous pet Marcus is really just an excuse to hang the narrative on a theme and appeal to pet people. The memoir is good enough to stand on its own, so the reader is left confused about dog story expectations. Be aware that Marcus of Umbria is actually about cultural commentary - with a dog in it - than about the dog herself, and all will be right with the world. One quibble: the flow of the story ends suddenly. This occurs in many memoirs - where the author seems to have a deadline and doesn't have the time to actually wrap anything up. I guess that is like life: not everything gets resolved in a neat little package. Yet, still, I can't help but feel if you are going to write a story about your life, that you find a way to create a natural stopping place for the story you've built 215 pages around.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
