Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy
Frances Mayes
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0767900383
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Widely published poet, gourmet chef, and travel writer, Frances Mayes opens the door to a voluptuous new world when she buys and restores an abandoned villa in the Tuscan countryside. What she shares with her readers is a feast for the senses as she explores the pastoral Italian landscape, history and cuisine.
Frommer's Italy 2013 (Frommer's Color Complete)
Leonardo's Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World
Poems and Selected Letters (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe)
Florence & Tuscany (Regional Travel Guide)
book on the many Roman roads of this area. Walking alone, I try to think of chariots tearing down the hill, though the only thing I'm likely to meet is a cinghiale, a wild boar, roaming around. One stream still has a trickle of water. Maybe a Roman messenger verging on heat stroke paused here and cooled his feet, as I do, when running south with news of how Hadrian's wall was coming along. There have been more recent visitors; on the grassy bank, I see a condom and a wad of tissue. When I walk
silent. My daughter, sick with flu in New York, is spending her first Christmas alone because the construction debacle threw off her plans to come to Italy. I stare for a long time at an ad for the Bahamas in a magazine, the totally expected photo of a crescent of sugar-sand beach along clear, azure water. Someone, somewhere, drifts on a yellow striped float, trailing her fingers in a warm current and dreaming under the sun. On Christmas Eve we have pasta with wild mushrooms, veal, an excellent
near a Roman road, an Etruscan (Etruscan!) wall looming at the top of the hillside, a Medici fortress in sight, a view toward Monte Amiata, a passageway underground, one hundred and seventeen olive trees, twenty plums, and still uncounted apricot, almond, apple, and pear trees. Several figs seem to thrive near the well. Beside the front steps there's a large hazelnut. Then, proximity to one of the most superb towns I've ever seen. Wouldn't we be crazy not to buy this lovely house called
cooks to set their chairs inside it and tend their pots. Downstairs the thirty-foot-long table is laid with pine boughs and red candles. Ghosts of Christmases past join us in everyone's stories of other holidays. Fenella pours the hot polenta onto a cutting board. Ed carves the faraone while Peter slices the succulent roast. We pile our plates. Fenella has journeyed to Montepulciano for a stash of her favorite vino nobile, which travels around the table. “To absent friends,” Fenella toasts. “To
fertilizer, though I'm afraid it will promote even more of the Jack and the Beanstalk mode. I cut an armful of white ones that bloom in ready-made bouquets. Inside, we iron our clothes, rearrange what has been shifted as many people made themselves comfortable to their own tastes. Everything quickly falls into place. Eons ago, it seems, I arrived in June to find ladders, workmen, pipes, wires, rubble, and dust everywhere. Now we just begin living. A pot of minestrone for the rainy nights. A walk
