Customer Reviews

Where the Cypress Rises

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

 

 

The book reveals an intelligent and sensitive artist, who succeded, with a special talent, in matching, touchingly, life experience and inner feelings with Umbrian picturesque landscape, so calm and exciting, ancient and peasant. Her pages shed light on what can happen to a wanderer( the specially gifted female protagonist), going abroad and meeting what life arranges for her family and herself. This book informs our hearts about it and makes us to reread landscapes we suppose to know perfectly.

It would be a mistake to place this book in the same category as that overworked genre - the foreigner who buys and does up a house in Italy or France. Virginia Ryan is married to an Italian, has represented Italy abroad as a diplomatic wife, has 2 Italian-Australian children. Her committment to the country, its history, customs and people show through on every page of this book. This is a year of her life that happens to be set in the hilltown of Trevi, Umbria as she sets out to make a new home and new friends, to begin to practice as an artist again, to help her children with yet another adaptation. She has an easy writing style; you feel you can trust her observations as she also admits her own shortcomings in settling into her new surroundings.

There's a lot of fun and joy of life in this book. And she KNOWS Italy and Italians, writing from within the culture, not about it.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to dip deeper into the life and spirit of contemporary Italy, with all its paradoxes and pleasures.

This is an unusually perceptive and open first-hand account of an artist and her family's move to Umbria. Unsentimental descriptions of their everyday joys and frustrations are counter-pointed by the dramatic upheaval of major earthquakes. Ryan articulates connections between the natural and built environments and the adventure of the self; between ancient traditions and contemporary creativity. I found it highly engaging - a page-turner. I'll return to it.

Virginia Ryan gives what no standard travel book could even approach: the authentic feel, taste and emotions of Italy, all interwoven in a fascinating personal story. It reads like a novel, yet takes you into an Italy that few tourists could hope to glimpse. Frances Mayes pales in comparison. I'd recommend it for anyone going to Italy, or who would like to go there in their armchair. It's a great, adventurous, authentic read. I loved it.

One can't help be charmed by Ms Ryan's observations of rural italian life,in a region where people's lives, in many respects, appear untouched by time. It is sometimes funny,without being patronizing,and obviously written by a person who loves Italy but doesn't see it through rose coloured glasses. A good read.