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Frances Mayes continues her love letter to Italy in this sequel to Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany. The restoration of her home, Bramasole, is complete, but Tuscany keeps unfolding. While the earlier books chronicled her and her husband's first years in Italy, this one is less full of stories than meditations on the elements of Tuscan pleasures, accompanied by photographs that give color to the place Mayes has described so lovingly and well.
"What makes the people so friendly, no, not just friendly, so genuinely kind and generous?" Mayes asks an Italian friend, then turns her intense attention to answer the question herself. Her answers range from baci (kisses), an intimate expression that "keeps alive the joy we all are born with," to la piazza, the navel of Italy's intense sense of community, to a deep love affair with food and seasonal delights. (Mayes shares the latter and once again gives recipes from the traditional to the idiosyncratic while her poet-husband Edward treats us to a description of the olive harvest). Then there is the Tuscans' territorial attachment to the land. Place, Mayes writes, makes you who you are and it is by reading the landscape that you find the story of how the people lived. Like a guidebook written by a good friend who reveals to you all the secret places they've found, Mayes leads us from out-of-the-way towns to great frescoes to tiny restaurants with exquisite delicacies (and even gives you their addresses). Turn down any one of Mayes's streets and there is something to contemplate.
In the distance you see villages crowning a hill or protectively stacked against a slope. Every one pulls me toward its altarpiece, special triptych, arched gate, gothic window, or fountain. Every one has its opinionated, eccentric, friendly, and intrinsic characters who make each place deeply itself.
Once again, Mayes presents Tuscany as an irresistible place where the pleasures are unexpected, sumptuous, and downright enviable. Immersing yourself in In Tuscany is the next best thing to being invited home to Bramasole. --Lesley Reed
From Publishers Weekly
Riding on the success of her previous books, Mayes, who here collaborates with her husband, returns with a curious amalgam of cookbook, coffee-table book, travel guide and memoir. As in Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, Mayes lovingly admires her adopted Tuscany, where she purchased a villa 10 years ago. Chapters are loosely organized around general concepts: for instance, "Baci (Kisses)" focuses on Italian effusiveness; "La Piazza" centers on the meeting place of Italian village life; and "La Festa (Celebration)" opens with a quote from a song by Jovanotti (an Italian pop band) and goes on to classify the many types of celebrations held in Italy, from Siena's Palio to weekly Sunday lunches. Mayes includes 25 recipes throughout the book, though concentrated in the chapters "La Cucina" and "Il Campo." While there are local recipes such as Onion Soup in the Arezzo Style and Chicken Liver on Little Crusts, some of her choices are puzzling. Mayes freely appropriates non-Tuscan items such as Capri's famed limoncello and Parmesan cheese and even provides a recipe for the mirepoix that is the base of many Italian dishes. A list of resources provides a calendar of festivals in the region as well as addresses and phone numbers for bars, restaurants and specialty stores. Kirst's (Spirit of the Place) endearing photos of Tuscan life fill the pages. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Mayes's obsession with Tuscany (Under the Tuscan Sun; Bella Tuscany) continues in this sleek, beautifully designed volume coauthored with poet-husband Edward (Works and Days) and augmented with color images by the award-winning Krist. Divided into seven sections, this collaboration successfully merges beautiful images of the Tuscan kitchen, local celebrations, and countryside with vibrant text for a fine introduction to the region's atmosphere. Mayes's requisite recipes are included, more to evoke a vicarious thrill than to move anyone actually to cook. In fact, the entire volume tries earnestly to make readers feel that they are in Tuscany itself. Unfortunately, even the best prose and the lushest photographs will never substitute for the actual experience. However, given the popularity of Mayes's previous books on Tuscany, this will be a popular and requested item in most libraries. Recommended for larger travel collections.-DOlga B. Wise, Compaq Computer Corp., Austin, TX Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From AudioFile
The piazza, feasts and celebrations, the fields, and the beauty of the scenery and the Tuscan people are highlighted in this collection of essays about the Italian region by Frances and Edward Mayes. Frances's honeyed drawl conveys a leisurely tone as she describes the details of her adopted home. Edward does a more dramatic reading, adding character voices and segments. The audio could have benefited from clearer divisions between the four subject areas of the book, and perhaps a booklet of some of the photos seen in the print version, but the authors' essays stand alone as evocative reading. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Purists who nevertheless demand authentic Italian cooking need look no further than Frances Mayes' In Tuscany. This heavily illustrated volume draws on the great success of the author's travel books, fleshing out her descriptions of Tuscan quotidian life with a handful of recipes for those simple, basic foods that sustain the residents of Italy's heartland. Other currently available Tuscan cookbooks provide a greater palette of foods but few so rich a visual detailing of the region.I Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Tuscany may have found its own bard in Frances Mayes."
--New York Times
"Irresistable...A senuous book for a sensuous countryside."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"An intense celebration of what she calls 'the voluptuousness of Italian life'... Appealing and very vivid... [The] book seems like the kind of thing you'd tuck into a picnic basket on an August day... or better yet, keep handy on the bedside table in the depths of January."
--New York Times Book Review
"A love letter to Italy written in precise and passionate language of near-poetic density... Maye's sequel offers something different, even richer and more complex, than her first account of life in Tuscany... This is a book to treasure, as the author so clearly treasures the life she engraves on our hearts."
--Newsday
"Frances Mayes is, before all else, a wonderful writer... She never loses sight of the fact that millenniums-old Tuscany, with its immemorial customs and folksways, is not to be domesticated or made familiar. Her Italy remains intransigently foreign, exotic, a continuing revelation of strangeness and unexpected beauties."
--Chicago Tribune
Review
"Tuscany may have found its own bard in Frances Mayes."
--New York Times
"Irresistable...A senuous book for a sensuous countryside."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"An intense celebration of what she calls 'the voluptuousness of Italian life'... Appealing and very vivid... [The] book seems like the kind of thing you'd tuck into a picnic basket on an August day... or better yet, keep handy on the bedside table in the depths of January."
--New York Times Book Review
"A love letter to Italy written in precise and passionate language of near-poetic density... Maye's sequel offers something different, even richer and more complex, than her first account of life in Tuscany... This is a book to treasure, as the author so clearly treasures the life she engraves on our hearts."
--Newsday
"Frances Mayes is, before all else, a wonderful writer... She never loses sight of the fact that millenniums-old Tuscany, with its immemorial customs and folksways, is not to be domesticated or made familiar. Her Italy remains intransigently foreign, exotic, a continuing revelation of strangeness and unexpected beauties."
--Chicago Tribune
Book Description
From the bestselling author whose memoirs Under the Sun and Bella Tuscany have captured the voluptuousness of Italian life comes a lavishly illustrated ode to the joys of Tuscany's people, food, landscapes, and art. In Tuscany celebrates the abundant pleasures of life in Italy as it is lived at home, at festivals, feasts, restaurants and markets, in the kitchen and on the piazza, in the vineyards, fields, and olive groves. Combining all-new essays by Frances Mayes and a chapter by her husband, poet Edward Mayes, with more than 200 full-color photos by photographer Bob Krist, each of this book's five sections highlights a signature aspect of Tuscan life:
La Piazza--the locus of Italian village life. With photgraphs of the shop signs, the outdoor markets, medieval streets, people, their pets and their cars, and snippets of conversations overheard, Mayes reveals the life of the Piazza in her town of Cortona as well as out-of-the-way places such as Volterra, Asciano, Monte San Savino, and Castelmuzio.
La Festa--the celebration. Essays and photos of feasts and celebrations, such as the Christmas dinner for twenty-seven at a neighbor's house and a donkey race around the church at Montepulciano Stazione, illustrate how the Tuscans celebrate the seasons--their open ways of friendship, their connection to nature, and most of all, their sense of abundance.
Il Campo--the field. Here Edward Mayes evokes the deep sense of the shift of seasons as he picks olives before he and Frances head off to the olive oil mill and enjoy the first bruscette with new oil.
La Cucina--the kitchen. An intimate view of the all-important role of the kitchen in Tuscan culture, including photographs of her own kitchen and gardens, menus from great local cooks, the elements of the Tuscan table, dishes with cultural and culinary notes on each, and, of course, delectable recipes.
La Bellezza--the beauty. From the quality of the light falling on sublime landscapes in different seasons and Tuscan faces in moments of laughter to a silhouette of cypress trees in the early evening and a wild bird perched on a neigbor's head, In Tuscany features views of beauty that reveal the singular splendor of one of the world's best-loved and most artistic regions.
From the Inside Flap
From the bestselling author whose memoirs Under the Sun and Bella Tuscany have captured the voluptuousness of Italian life comes a lavishly illustrated ode to the joys of Tuscany's people, food, landscapes, and art. In Tuscany celebrates the abundant pleasures of life in Italy as it is lived at home, at festivals, feasts, restaurants and markets, in the kitchen and on the piazza, in the vineyards, fields, and olive groves. Combining all-new essays by Frances Mayes and a chapter by her husband, poet Edward Mayes, with more than 200 full-color photos by photographer Bob Krist, each of this book's five sections highlights a signature aspect of Tuscan life:
La Piazza--the locus of Italian village life. With photgraphs of the shop signs, the outdoor markets, medieval streets, people, their pets and their cars, and snippets of conversations overheard, Mayes reveals the life of the Piazza in her town of Cortona as well as out-of-the-way places such as Volterra, Asciano, Monte San Savino, and Castelmuzio.
La Festa--the celebration. Essays and photos of feasts and celebrations, such as the Christmas dinner for twenty-seven at a neighbor's house and a donkey race around the church at Montepulciano Stazione, illustrate how the Tuscans celebrate the seasons--their open ways of friendship, their connection to nature, and most of all, their sense of abundance.
Il Campo--the field. Here Edward Mayes evokes the deep sense of the shift of seasons as he picks olives before he and Frances head off to the olive oil mill and enjoy the first bruscette with new oil.
La Cucina--the kitchen. An intimate view of the all-important role of the kitchen in Tuscan culture, including photographs of her own kitchen and gardens, menus from great local cooks, the elements of the Tuscan table, dishes with cultural and culinary notes on each, and, of course, delectable recipes.
La Bellezza--the beauty. From the quality of the light falling on sublime landscapes in different seasons and Tuscan faces in moments of laughter to a silhouette of cypress trees in the early evening and a wild bird perched on a neigbor's head, In Tuscany features views of beauty that reveal the singular splendor of one of the world's best-loved and most artistic regions.
From the Back Cover
"Tuscany may have found its own bard in Frances Mayes."
--New York Times
"Irresistable...A senuous book for a sensuous countryside."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"An intense celebration of what she calls 'the voluptuousness of Italian life'... Appealing and very vivid... [The] book seems like the kind of thing you'd tuck into a picnic basket on an August day... or better yet, keep handy on the bedside table in the depths of January."
--New York Times Book Review
"A love letter to Italy written in precise and passionate language of near-poetic density... Maye's sequel offers something different, even richer and more complex, than her first account of life in Tuscany... This is a book to treasure, as the author so clearly treasures the life she engraves on our hearts."
--Newsday
"Frances Mayes is, before all else, a wonderful writer... She never loses sight of the fact that millenniums-old Tuscany, with its immemorial customs and folksways, is not to be domesticated or made familiar. Her Italy remains intransigently foreign, exotic, a continuing revelation of strangeness and unexpected beauties."
--Chicago Tribune
About the Author
Frances Mayes is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscanny, as well as five books of poetry. Edward Mayes is the author of Works and Days and five other books of poetry. He is director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Clara University. They live in San Francisco and Cortona, Italy.
Bob Krist is the author of Spirit of Place: The Art of the Traveling Photographer. His international photography has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Islands, and many other publications. A contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler and Popular Photography, he lives in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
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