Books I Love: Under the Tuscan Sun

Frances Mayes is an American writer, poet and essayist and a former professor of creative writing. She wrote her memoir Under the Tuscan Sun; at Home in Italy in 1996, about her acquisition and restoration of an 200-year old abandoned villa (Bramasole) in Tuscany, Italy. I bought and first read this book in 2001 and my note inside the back cover reads "17.7.2001, finished reading this book... Impression? ENVY in a word!" I read it again before we went to Italy in November 2006 and ensured that while there we'd experience and enjoy some Tuscan sun! (Under the Tuscan Sun was made into a film in 2003).

In fact this volume together with Bella Tuscany; the Sweet Life in Tuscany (1999) and Every Day in Tuscany; Seasons of an Italian Life (2010) make up Mayes' Tuscan trilogy which is all about living in the Italian countryside and the pleasures of food, wine, art, gardens and the Italian zest for life. (Note: I have yet to read the second and third volume of her trilogy.)

Mayes is reputedly 'the woman who single-handedly started the travel-memoir craze'. Another travel memoir A Year in the World; Journeys of a Passionate Traveller (2006) is lauded as 'vintage Frances Mayes - a celebration of the allure of travel, of serendipitous pleasures found in unlikely locales, of memory woven into the present, and a joyous sense of quest'. My favourite chapter is the one on Crete and Mani (Greece) where I could relate to some of the places she visited.

Under the Tuscan Sun; at Home in Italy. Ex Libris CNB 0072
A Year in the World; Journeys of a Passionate Traveller 2006. Ex Libris CNB 1665 
www.francesmayesbooks.com