BocelliOnline

[La Donna e Mobile]

I adore Frances Mayes' books on Tuscany!! "Under the Tuscan Sun", "Bella Tuscany" & "In Tuscany". I suspect many of you have read these. For those who aren't familiar, it's the story of Frances & Ed Mayes, San Francisco professors, who purchase & renovate a villa in the town of Cortona, Italy. It's a labor of love for them and she goes into beautiful detail about the house, the Italian people & countryside, gardening, and food. She includes many recipes. I love her curiosity, eye for detail, & appreciation of the beauty around her. Every day is a gift to open & discover. I want to be like that! I also like the fact that she was born in a small Georgia town (Fitzgerald) not two hours from where I live. Anyone at all interested in Italy will enjoy these books, so dreamy they're a mini vacation in themselves.

P.S. This is a great new forum! I look forward to the new posts.
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"To sing, to sing, to sing......." (Andrea revealing his future plans to Classic fm)

[Willma]

I enjoyed this book immensely but came away green with envy that I do not have a life style that permits such extended getaways. I found their dealing with local contractors and bonding with the Polish workers particualrly hilarious. This is a great read.

[jo]

What a terrific book! Like Willma, I'm green with envy that I can't do something similar -- just go to Italy for an extended period of time -- buy a second home there -- soak up the sights and sounds and smells -- live today's new life somewhere that is both new and very ancient at the same time.

And Frances Mayes has a delightful sense of humor in addition to the gift of drawing a beautiful picture in words describing her love affair with Tuscany -- the place and the people.

[Echo]

FYI - From http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/08/20/wkd.frances.mayes.ap/index.html


Author always 'Under the Tuscan Sun'
Movie, new book in Frances Mayes' fall
Wednesday, August 20, 2003 Posted: 10:59 AM EDT (1459 GMT)
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CORTONA, Italy (AP) -- It's a hot, steamy and sun-soaked day in August, and Frances Mayes is precisely where you think you'd find her: under Tuscany's sun, lounging in the villa and lifestyle she made so enviable seven years ago.

In 1996, Mayes published "Under the Tuscan Sun," the best-selling, recipe-laced memoir about moving to Italy and finding herself while restoring a heap of a house in the Tuscan countryside.

Today, the house is pristine, although gracefully showing its age, and gardens of flowers, figs and lemons expertly pruned. But for a poet who so lyrically wrote about the languid days of Cortona, with its simple pleasures and religiously adhered-to siestas, Mayes has been awfully busy of late.

There's the movie based on her book, starring Diane Lane as Mayes, which premieres September 20 in Los Angeles and opens in other U.S. theaters six days later. There's her first novel, "Swan," which comes out a few weeks earlier. Then there's the line of furniture Mayes has designed for Drexel-Heritage, "A Home in Tuscany Collection" -- samples of which adorn her house.

She has even launched an arts and music festival with friends in Cortona this August, and, of course, has more books coming out, including one linked to the new furniture line and one scheduled for 2005 entitled "A Home in the World," about house-hunting in 12 countries.

So has Mayes been able to kick back and enjoy her beloved "Bramasole" (the villa's name means "yearning for the sun"), or has she been too busy with projects that grew from the fame of its painstaking restoration?

"Let's say that I am looking forward to becoming a full-time writer again after things settle down," she says over espresso one recent afternoon.

'I don't believe in God, but I wish I did'

She is sitting in a plush, white armchair -- part of the new furniture line -- in Bramasole's wood-beamed living room, overlooking the terraced garden and the green Valdichiana valley below. Nearby is the eat-in kitchen, where in one of the more surprising discoveries mentioned in her book, Mayes uncovered a farm-scene fresco while scrubbing the walls.

Upstairs is the study, where you can picture her writing "Under the Tuscan Sun" and its successors -- "Bella Tuscany" and "In Tuscany."

Sprinkled throughout are flea market and antique fair finds -- a stone basin here, a map of Italy and painting of the Madonna with Child there -- all of which serve as inspiration for her furniture book, "A Tuscan Home," due out next year.

On a tour of the three-story house, Mayes is particularly excited when she comes across her collection of encased saints' relics.

"I am not religious, and I don't believe in God, but I wish I did," she says, explaining her love of religious icons, paintings and religious imagery that adorn the villa's walls.

She wrote about them in "Under the Tuscan Sun": about churches whose lines were so light it looked like they could fly "given the proper miracle"; about finding a small, rare painting of Christ in the San Niccolo church, and finding a "modern Madonna" in a bar nursing a child with "breasts the size of cantaloupes."

Such descriptions, peppered with tales of wine-filled dinners and recipes for cold garlic soup, painted a picture of sensuous country living that was as tantalizing to lovers of Italy as Peter Mayles' "A Year in Provence" was to fans of the French countryside.

Hoards of Americans and Europeans have followed in their footsteps and bought do-it-yourself fix-up homes in Italy and France to live out the fantasy of la dolce vita -- country-style -- that the authors described so well.

But Mayes, who grew up in Fitzgerald, Georgia, acknowledges that she's not entirely fulfilled staying home, writing and cooking fabulous dinners.

"One side of me is pulled by the sense of home, being domestic, being a writer and an observer," she says. "The other pushes to be the traveler who closes the door of the house and leaves in search of an adventure."

It was that sense of adventure that brought Mayes, then a creative writing professor at San Francisco State University, to Tuscany in the first place. Her first marriage to an IBM executive had failed, and she needed to start over.

With her new mate and future husband, Ed, Mayes arrived in Cortona in 1990, and the two soon found Bramasole and began to resurrect it and their lives.

The locals had turned their noses up at Bramasole -- it was too run down to resuscitate, they said -- but today they admire the pluck of the "stranieri" -- the foreigners -- who took it on.

Cortona resident Siliano Stanganini, speaking in Italian, said Mayes gave the locals a lesson in "courage, energy and determination to do something the locals would not even consider attempting."

The house is still not finished, and its terra cotta-colored plaster on the facade is cracking off. But that doesn't bother Mayes.

"I like the house to show its layers of time," she says. While Mayes is resisting the same aging process, she concedes that she could do a lot worse than staying at home in Bramasole.

"I don't like getting older. But Italy is a good place to grow old," she says.
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My heart opens to your voice
Like the flowers open to the kisses of the dawn!
But, o my beloved, to dry my tears the best,
Let your voice speak again!
- Mon coeur s'ouvre a la voix, Samson et Dalila - Saint Saens

[Guest]

What a beautiful story. And if I'm correct, they are making this into a movie.