GIVEAWAY ENDEDEVERY DAY IN TUSCANY
BY FRANCES MAYES
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this sequel to her New York Times bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, the celebrated "bard of Tuscany" (New York Times) lyrically chronicles her continuing, two decades-long love affair with Tuscany's people, art, cuisine, and lifestyle.
Frances Mayes offers her readers a deeply personal memoir of her present-day life in Tuscany, encompassing both the changes she has experienced since Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany appeared, and sensuous, evocative reflections on the timeless beauty and vivid pleasures of Italian life. Among the themes Mayes explores are how her experience of Tuscany dramatically expanded when she renovated and became a part-time resident of a 13th century house with a stone roof in the mountains above Cortona, how life in the mountains introduced her to a "wilder" side of Tuscany--and with it a lively engagement with Tuscany's mountain people. Throughout, she reveals the concrete joys of life in her adopted hill town, with particular attention to life in the piazza, the art of Luca Signorelli (Renaissance painter from Cortona), and the pastoral pleasures of feasting from her garden. Moving always toward a deeper engagement, Mayes writes of Tuscan icons that have become for her storehouses of memory, of crucible moments from which bigger ideas emerged, and of the writing life she has enjoyed in the room where Under the Tuscan Sun began.
With more on the pleasures of life at Bramasole, the delights and challenges of living in Italy day-to-day and favorite recipes, Every Day in Tuscany is a passionate and inviting account of the richness and complexity of Italian life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
FRANCES MAYES is the author of four books about Tuscany. The now-classic Under the Tuscan Sun–which was a New York Times bestseller for more than two and a half years and became a Touchstone movie starring Diane Lane. It was followed by Bella Tuscany and two illustrated books, In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home. She is also the author of the novel, Swan, six books of poetry, and The Discovery of Poetry. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. In addition to her Tuscany memoirs, Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, Frances Mayes is the author of the travel memoir A Year in the World; the illustrated books In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home; Swan, a novel; The Discovery of Poetry, a text for readers; and five books of poetry. She divides her time between homes in Italy and North Carolina.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW:
In this sequel to her New York Times bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, the celebrated "bard of Tuscany" (New York Times) lyrically chronicles her continuing, two decades-long love affair with Tuscany's people, art, cuisine, and lifestyle.
Frances Mayes offers her readers a deeply personal memoir of her present-day life in Tuscany, encompassing both the changes she has experienced since Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany appeared, and sensuous, evocative reflections on the timeless beauty and vivid pleasures of Italian life. Among the themes Mayes explores are how her experience of Tuscany dramatically expanded when she renovated and became a part-time resident of a 13th century house with a stone roof in the mountains above Cortona, how life in the mountains introduced her to a "wilder" side of Tuscany--and with it a lively engagement with Tuscany's mountain people. Throughout, she reveals the concrete joys of life in her adopted hill town, with particular attention to life in the piazza, the art of Luca Signorelli (Renaissance painter from Cortona), and the pastoral pleasures of feasting from her garden. Moving always toward a deeper engagement, Mayes writes of Tuscan icons that have become for her storehouses of memory, of crucible moments from which bigger ideas emerged, and of the writing life she has enjoyed in the room where Under the Tuscan Sun began.
With more on the pleasures of life at Bramasole, the delights and challenges of living in Italy day-to-day and favorite recipes, Every Day in Tuscany is a passionate and inviting account of the richness and complexity of Italian life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
FRANCES MAYES is the author of four books about Tuscany. The now-classic Under the Tuscan Sun–which was a New York Times bestseller for more than two and a half years and became a Touchstone movie starring Diane Lane. It was followed by Bella Tuscany and two illustrated books, In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home. She is also the author of the novel, Swan, six books of poetry, and The Discovery of Poetry. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. In addition to her Tuscany memoirs, Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, Frances Mayes is the author of the travel memoir A Year in the World; the illustrated books In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home; Swan, a novel; The Discovery of Poetry, a text for readers; and five books of poetry. She divides her time between homes in Italy and North Carolina. AUTHOR INTERVIEW:
Frances Mayes Interview: EVERY DAY IN TUSCANY
Frances is busy promoting this wonderful new book but took time to send me this great interview. Please read and enjoy...it will be important for your entry for the book giveaway
1.) Q: Every Day in Tuscany is your third book set in the small town of Cortona. What attracts you to the memoir form?
FM: I love the immediacy of present tense writing. Italy equals happiness to me and I like the challenge of writing about that state of being. In the books of poetry I wrote before my Italian life began, I was exploring the dark side—and that went on for many years. Yeats says that when he changed his syntax he changed his world. When I changed my world, my genre quickly shifted. This was a big surprise and gift.
2.) Q: Since Under the Tuscan Sun you’ve written two photo-texts, a novel, and a book of travel essays. So, you don’t exactly stick to a genre. Why is that?
FM: Instinct. And I don’t like to fall into habits of writing. After all, I’m trying to entertain myself in these books! My novel Swan is set in Georgia, where I grew up. I’d long wanted to steep myself in that place again. And A Year in the World allowed me to stay in places where I’d dreamed of living. There is a thread: all my writing involves that Southern obsession—a sense of place.
3.) Q: In Every Day in Tuscany you are shocked to encounter a side of Italian life you’d not seen before when you received a frightening threat due to your stance on a controversial local issue. Is this because you wore rose-colored glasses?
FM: [laughs] I always wear those, Versace if possible. No, seriously, I don’t romanticize Italy—if only I had the words to do justice to life there. This incident you refer to did shake me to the foundation. The roots of it always were present; I just never had known because I’d never publicly challenged anything, had never needed to.
4.) Q: How were you able to pick up and move on after this event?
FM: I hope I’ve written the answer in the book. What do you do after anything ugly happens? Pick up, move on. I think my relationship to the place deepened but it’s complex. After a betrayal, you may be wiser but you don’t necessarily want that wisdom.
5.) Q: What are the greatest joys you experience in your Tuscan life?
FM: First, that it always seems new. Second, that I know I’ll never, ever reach a point where I’ll say, Now I know Italy. I love the light and the sound of bells. Then there’s a whole crowd of peak pleasures: friends, food, art, wine, striking out in the Fiat and traveling thirty miles where I’m sure to find a new landscape, pasta, cheese, piazza, dialect, and fresco. Oh, and listening to stories, especially from the old Italians.
6.) Q: And in America?
FM: My family and friends. The rich, fecund smell of the South, its balmy—sometimes almost congealed--air. The jolt of contemporary art and architecture. Southern beaches seem sublime to me, as do the little towns with towering trees and front porches. The South is looped in my DNA so the metabolic connection feels right and profound.
7.) Q: You’ve written that although your house in Tuscany is not a dream house by magazine standards, it is “like a house in a dream.” What does that mean to you?
FM: Your secret dream house will correspond to your inner fantasy of what life might be. When I found Bramasole, I’d looked in several parts of Tuscany over a period of two years, bumping over rough roads to find collapsed houses overlooking raw quarries, or almost windowless houses guarded by nests of snakes and a thousand blackberry brambles. Two attracted me strongly–a roofless house with a tower built by the Knights Templar, and a sweet farmhouse in a ring of chestnut trees. Both were owned by contessas who balked the moment they realized someone might really want to buy the old family plots. One, through her tears, doubled the price on the spot. Then I encountered Bramasole. Be prepared for your dream house to look totally unlike anything you imagined you wanted. Recognizing the house is a mysterious and immediate moment, like falling in love at first sight. I stepped out of the car here, looked up, and said, “This is it.”
8.) Q: What is it like to live in two cultures, the American South and Tuscany?
FM: The yellow shoes, the particular spatula, the reference book–when you want them–will be at the other house. The journey to and fro is a drastic commute. I have missed my friends’ daughters’ weddings, an aunt’s illness, and I constantly miss my daughter and grandson. Mail goes astray in both places. Otherwise, touch iron, touch wood, living in each place, especially when one of them is foreign and new, throws the other into high relief. The political foibles, the table, style, everyday life—the contrasts make me take nothing for granted. This is a great boon when sometimes we come to a point of knowing, perhaps too well, how to do what we do, how to live as we live. I love the contrast of living here and living in the South. And, oddly, there are so many similarities—hospitality, manners, tolerance of eccentrics, even the sense of time being long and forgiving.
9.) Q: I’ve heard that foreigners are never really accepted when they settle in European countries. Is that correct?
FM: Well, I can speak only of Italy and NO, that’s absurd. It was a shock to find that we made friends before we spoke much Italian. My mother always said that attraction is based on smell; perhaps she was right. Maria Rita at the fruttae verdura was giving me a hug before I could talk to her. A neighbor asked us to dinner right away. We dreaded going–long awkward silences with only the sound of chewing in the air. “Ask us later, please, because we don’t speak well,” we got out in Italian. He looked incredulous, his eyebrows shot up and he said, “You eat, don’t you?” And that is the way it has gone for us. Other ex-pats around us have plenty of Italian friends, too. The key is to learn the language. If you don’t, your new friends will become bored while you cast around for the correct indirect object pronoun.
10.) Q: What are your favorite recipes in this book?
FM: All! One of the most interesting is the duck breasts from Il Postale’s chef. It may not seem Italian but actually the spice mixture is typical of Renaissance cuisine. Be careful not to overcook the spice mixture, as I did the first time I tried it. Nothing burns hotter than sugar and mine turned solid as it cooled. Note that “slightly caramelize” in the recipe and make sure it’s a sauce not instant quartz crystals! Another favorite is Ed’s kale and sausage soup, a rainy day masterpiece.
11.) Q: What’s your next project?
FM: I’m in that delicious period of contemplation. Another novel? A cookbook? A Southern memoir? In the kitchen, it’s fun to have all the burners going at once and maybe that’s a good model for writing.
GIVEAWAYFrances is busy promoting this wonderful new book but took time to send me this great interview. Please read and enjoy...it will be important for your entry for the book giveaway
1.) Q: Every Day in Tuscany is your third book set in the small town of Cortona. What attracts you to the memoir form?
FM: I love the immediacy of present tense writing. Italy equals happiness to me and I like the challenge of writing about that state of being. In the books of poetry I wrote before my Italian life began, I was exploring the dark side—and that went on for many years. Yeats says that when he changed his syntax he changed his world. When I changed my world, my genre quickly shifted. This was a big surprise and gift.
2.) Q: Since Under the Tuscan Sun you’ve written two photo-texts, a novel, and a book of travel essays. So, you don’t exactly stick to a genre. Why is that?
FM: Instinct. And I don’t like to fall into habits of writing. After all, I’m trying to entertain myself in these books! My novel Swan is set in Georgia, where I grew up. I’d long wanted to steep myself in that place again. And A Year in the World allowed me to stay in places where I’d dreamed of living. There is a thread: all my writing involves that Southern obsession—a sense of place.
3.) Q: In Every Day in Tuscany you are shocked to encounter a side of Italian life you’d not seen before when you received a frightening threat due to your stance on a controversial local issue. Is this because you wore rose-colored glasses?
FM: [laughs] I always wear those, Versace if possible. No, seriously, I don’t romanticize Italy—if only I had the words to do justice to life there. This incident you refer to did shake me to the foundation. The roots of it always were present; I just never had known because I’d never publicly challenged anything, had never needed to.
4.) Q: How were you able to pick up and move on after this event?
FM: I hope I’ve written the answer in the book. What do you do after anything ugly happens? Pick up, move on. I think my relationship to the place deepened but it’s complex. After a betrayal, you may be wiser but you don’t necessarily want that wisdom.
5.) Q: What are the greatest joys you experience in your Tuscan life?
FM: First, that it always seems new. Second, that I know I’ll never, ever reach a point where I’ll say, Now I know Italy. I love the light and the sound of bells. Then there’s a whole crowd of peak pleasures: friends, food, art, wine, striking out in the Fiat and traveling thirty miles where I’m sure to find a new landscape, pasta, cheese, piazza, dialect, and fresco. Oh, and listening to stories, especially from the old Italians.
6.) Q: And in America?
FM: My family and friends. The rich, fecund smell of the South, its balmy—sometimes almost congealed--air. The jolt of contemporary art and architecture. Southern beaches seem sublime to me, as do the little towns with towering trees and front porches. The South is looped in my DNA so the metabolic connection feels right and profound.
7.) Q: You’ve written that although your house in Tuscany is not a dream house by magazine standards, it is “like a house in a dream.” What does that mean to you?
FM: Your secret dream house will correspond to your inner fantasy of what life might be. When I found Bramasole, I’d looked in several parts of Tuscany over a period of two years, bumping over rough roads to find collapsed houses overlooking raw quarries, or almost windowless houses guarded by nests of snakes and a thousand blackberry brambles. Two attracted me strongly–a roofless house with a tower built by the Knights Templar, and a sweet farmhouse in a ring of chestnut trees. Both were owned by contessas who balked the moment they realized someone might really want to buy the old family plots. One, through her tears, doubled the price on the spot. Then I encountered Bramasole. Be prepared for your dream house to look totally unlike anything you imagined you wanted. Recognizing the house is a mysterious and immediate moment, like falling in love at first sight. I stepped out of the car here, looked up, and said, “This is it.”
8.) Q: What is it like to live in two cultures, the American South and Tuscany?
FM: The yellow shoes, the particular spatula, the reference book–when you want them–will be at the other house. The journey to and fro is a drastic commute. I have missed my friends’ daughters’ weddings, an aunt’s illness, and I constantly miss my daughter and grandson. Mail goes astray in both places. Otherwise, touch iron, touch wood, living in each place, especially when one of them is foreign and new, throws the other into high relief. The political foibles, the table, style, everyday life—the contrasts make me take nothing for granted. This is a great boon when sometimes we come to a point of knowing, perhaps too well, how to do what we do, how to live as we live. I love the contrast of living here and living in the South. And, oddly, there are so many similarities—hospitality, manners, tolerance of eccentrics, even the sense of time being long and forgiving.
9.) Q: I’ve heard that foreigners are never really accepted when they settle in European countries. Is that correct?
FM: Well, I can speak only of Italy and NO, that’s absurd. It was a shock to find that we made friends before we spoke much Italian. My mother always said that attraction is based on smell; perhaps she was right. Maria Rita at the fruttae verdura was giving me a hug before I could talk to her. A neighbor asked us to dinner right away. We dreaded going–long awkward silences with only the sound of chewing in the air. “Ask us later, please, because we don’t speak well,” we got out in Italian. He looked incredulous, his eyebrows shot up and he said, “You eat, don’t you?” And that is the way it has gone for us. Other ex-pats around us have plenty of Italian friends, too. The key is to learn the language. If you don’t, your new friends will become bored while you cast around for the correct indirect object pronoun.
10.) Q: What are your favorite recipes in this book?
FM: All! One of the most interesting is the duck breasts from Il Postale’s chef. It may not seem Italian but actually the spice mixture is typical of Renaissance cuisine. Be careful not to overcook the spice mixture, as I did the first time I tried it. Nothing burns hotter than sugar and mine turned solid as it cooled. Note that “slightly caramelize” in the recipe and make sure it’s a sauce not instant quartz crystals! Another favorite is Ed’s kale and sausage soup, a rainy day masterpiece.
11.) Q: What’s your next project?
FM: I’m in that delicious period of contemplation. Another novel? A cookbook? A Southern memoir? In the kitchen, it’s fun to have all the burners going at once and maybe that’s a good model for writing.
AT RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHING,
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