Author(s): Frances Mayes

Travel

In this new memoir Frances Mayes offers her readers another deeply personal account of her present-day life in Tuscany, encompassing both the changes she has experienced since her previous memoirs appeared, and sensuous, evocative reflections on the timeless, unchanging beauty and simple pleasures of Italian life. Among the themes Mayes examines are how her life in the mountains introduced her to a 'wilder' side of Tuscany and with it a new scale of engagement among Tuscany's mountain people. Throughout she thoughtfully muses on the many concerete joys of building an Italian life: Tuscan icons that connect with her life and have become for her storehouses of memory; crucible moments from which bigger ideas have emerged; how a significant part of her adjustment to Italian metabolism has awakened her to the possibilities in spontaneity and trust in instinct; and reflections on the writing life she has enjoyed in the room where Under the Tuscan Sun began and on the wider view she's gained since then.