A Valley in Italy: The Many Seasons of a Villa in Umbria [Hardcover]

Lisa St Aubin De Teran (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1994

The author of The Slow Train to Milan recounts a year in her life and the lives of her neighbors in San Orsela, a small town in the Umbrian hills of Italy. National ad/promo.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In 1989, novelist St. Aubin de Teran (Slow Train to Milan, LJ 3/15/84) and her family began to restore their "dream house," the dilapidated ruins of a villa near the small village of San Orsola in the Umbrian Valley of Italy. This book chronicles their first year of impossibly hard work amid the pleasantries of rich harvests and continuous celebrations. Orginally from England, St. Aubin de Teran gives the reader vivid impressions of Italian life, social customs, bureaucracy, and culture, presenting a setting where food and wine are the daily religion. Her book conveys a strong sense of place, with lush descriptions of the gardens, countryside, weather, and the family's active social life. The year culminated with a habitable villa; a full larder, including walnut liqueur and medicinal herbs; a New Year's Eve dance at the villa; a wedding; and a new baby. Recommended for the armchair traveler.
Janine Reid, Jefferson Cty. P.L., Lakewood, Col.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

St. Aubin de Ter n (Nocturne, 1993, etc.) jumps on the Year in Provence bandwagon with this tale of her family's purchase and renovation of a decrepit villa in Italy's Umbria region. The structure of the narrative follows the house's reconstruction and different events in the small village of San Orsola, a place where, unsurprisingly, the neighbors are all friendly caricatures. The laborers working on the house are soulful and slow; the locals all make wine; St. Aubin de Ter n's daughter and the two Irish au pairs assigned to care for her young son carouse in various discotheques with the expected gang of Italian teenagers. Occasionally there is a spark of originality in the material, usually when a more daring revelation is made, such as, ``Most Italian men publicly touch their genitals at regular intervals, as though to check that they are still there.'' Generally, however, St. Aubin de Ter n follows the party line. The prose has some lapses into preciousness--her teenage daughter is referred to as ``the child Iseult'' throughout--but mostly it coasts along on the very familiarity of the material. St. Aubin de Ter n frustrates most with her too-fleeting glimpses of her past. She refers briefly to a period of work on a Venezuelan sugar plantation, as well as to a disastrous first marriage, but for a book that purportedly centers on a family and their home, there is very little in the way of personal information. For example, she reveals that she, her husband, her daughter, and her son all bear different surnames, and later, when she becomes pregnant, points out that it is her husband's first child, without further explanation. While there is nothing offensively bad here, this tepid volume offers little that will not be familiar to readers of Tim Parks's Italian Neighbors (1992). -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 219 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins (June 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060168862
• ISBN-13: 978-0060168865
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,907,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Valley In Italy: Revisited, November 25, 1999

By 

Helen Verlander (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Valley in Italy (Paperback)

I have now read St. Aubin De Teran's "A Valley In Italy" at least three times. It is to be recommended to anyone with a love of Italy and of house restorations. Unlike Frances Mayes' book, "Under the Tuscan Sun", which came after it (and which I also enjoyed despite what follows), this is not a lifestyle book. There are no recipes and there is no dwelling on the sensuousness of eating and drinking as in Mayes. Side by side with St. Aubin De Teran's book, Mayes' appears rather superficial and solipsistic but of course, well targetted to a foreign, particularly American audience. In the course of "Under the Tuscan Sun", there is really only one Italian the main American characters seem to have any continuing relationship with, albeit very fleeting, the man who found the house for them. There is never any sense that they are anything but very middle class tourists who just happen to have a house in bella Tuscany they visit in their holidays. In "A Valley in Italy" the family of the writer who speaks fluent Italian, actually lives in the villa all the year around and engages with the local community on a daily basis and through all their festivities. The two children are pivotal in propelling them immediately into Italian society, an advantage Mayes and her partner did not enjoy. Where Mayes is obsessed with her own personal sensations and can rhapsodize over a sun-dried tomato, St. Aubin De Teran is a cool observer of the inhabitants of San Orsola and documents their lives with a detail that shows her fascination with the objective world rather than simply how it impinges on her. It is a memorable account both of a small Italian village and its tight community life and the achievement of a fantastic dream, the renovation and partial rebuilding of a derelict villa of palatial proportions, boasting 72 windows, considerably larger than the more modest peasant abode Mayes takes on. Everyone I have recommended the Mayes and St. Aubin De Teran books to have loved the latter and found the former rather self-indulgent. It has to be said that St. Aubin De Teran's family are eccentric in the grand English style but as the focus is outwards upon place and people this is not an irritant like Mayes' precious harping on peculiar obsessions like other people's linen in "Bella Donna." Rather, the idiosyncrasies documented are viewed as bizarre and impractical in the Italian setting like the mouldy jars of homemade facial potions the daughter replaces for all the necessities of camping in the ruined villa or the Scottish artist husband's prancing about in full highland regalia which is his way of mocking the traditonal role of almighty pater familias assigned him by the Italian builder who forces him on tours of inspection. This book only improves with rereading. I heartily recommend it.

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Travelers put down roots, August 21, 2001

By 

Ivy (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Valley in Italy (Paperback)

In A Valley in Italy, Lisa St. Aubin De Teran tells the story of how she found her dream house in Italy and how her perpetually wandering family put down roots at last. De Teran and her husband bought an unfinished and deteriorating villa in a small town in Umbria and then set about restoring it - or, actually, hiring people to restore it. In the process, they assimilated into the nearby village, entering its life and even following some of its customs.

Although I loved the book, it probably isn't for everyone. For one thing, De Teran and her husband are unusual people - the sort of people who would buy an enormous, mostly ruined house without any clear idea of how they would pay for it or how they could rebuild it. They are bohemian, they live casually, and they clearly have values very different from the average American's. But for those who can appreciate people unlike themselves, the characters of the family members will make the book; much of the pleasure of it comes from hearing about the results of these people's unusual choices.

Readers should go into this expecting a very personal memoir. De Teran has chosen an Austen-style microcosm - just a village and a manor house - and focuses on it exclusively. The result is a book that is not a travel guide and not a cultural survey, but rather a painting of a particular place at a particular time seen through particular eyes. A Valley in Italy beautifully communicates the nature of San Orsola and its residents - and also, of course, the author and her family.

De Teran's prose, while unorthodox, is most enjoyable. Her humor and her descriptive prose are extremely enjoyable. Unlike many of the authors writing memoirs of Italy, De Teran doesn't take her subject with absolutely unleavened gravitas - she can be light and funny as well as artistically descriptive. In fact, the tone and voice not only make up for the somewhat unconventional paragraphing and the sometimes harsh transitions between topics, they manage to turn it into a cohesive style.

But probably the biggest single strength of the book is the author's involvement. Too many authors of expat memoirs hold themselves aloof, in their text and presumably in their lives, from their adopted countries. They lack the linguistic and social skills to enter village life, so they observe it and document it from afar. De Teran apparently managed to enter into the local culture, and as a result her book contains much less navel-gazing and is much less patronizing than many books of this kind.

In short, Lisa St. Aubin De Teran has written a gorgeous, pleasant, and funny book on the kind of life most of us would rather read about than live. A Valley in Italy succeeds supremely as both an engaging portrait of an Italian village and an amusing tale of one eccentric family's experiences. This book is well worth reading, not just once but again and again.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The child..., March 21, 2001

By A Customer

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This review is from: A Valley in Italy (Paperback)

I have to agree with the reviewer, Foxtop, this writer is so distracting with her eccentricities and idiosyncracies that I found this book barely tolerable. In fact, after author calls her daughter "the child Iseault" one time too many for me (and this was after only about 20 pages), I actually wrote in the margin how grating on my nerves this was. Fortunately, I know my sister will get a laugh out of my comments (and will probably be equally annoyed by the author's "precious-isms" as I) when I pass this book onto her.