In Tuscany by Frances Mayes, Bob Krist (Photographer), Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes (With)

From Barnes & Noble

Experience the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of Tuscany, with bestselling author Frances Mayes as your guide. Featuring delicious recipes, stunning photographs by award-winning travel photographer Bob Krist, and Mayes's vivid, poetic prose, In Tuscany is an extraordinary complement to Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, Mayes's lyrical Tuscan memoirs. Transcending the boundaries of the travelogue, In Tuscany is unique blend of cookbook, travel guide, and art book. All-new text, which includes 25 irresistible recipes, leads readers through the magical villages, kitchens, and festivals that make Tuscany a paradise for the senses.

From the Publisher

From the bestselling author whose memoirs Under the Sun and Bella Tuscany have captured the voluptuousness of Italian life comes a lavishly illustrated ode to the joys of Tuscany's people, food, landscapes, and art.  In Tuscany celebrates the abundant pleasures of life in Italy as it is lived at home, at festivals, feasts, restaurants and markets, in the kitchen and on the piazza, in the vineyards, fields, and olive groves.  Combining all-new essays by Frances Mayes and a chapter by her husband, poet Edward Mayes, with more than 200 full-color photos by photographer Bob Krist, each of this book's five sections highlights a signature aspect of Tuscan life:


La Piazza--the locus of Italian village life.  With photgraphs of the shop signs, the outdoor markets, medieval streets, people, their pets and their cars, and snippets of conversations overheard, Mayes reveals the life of the Piazza in her town of Cortona as well as out-of-the-way places such as Volterra, Asciano, Monte San Savino, and Castelmuzio.

La Festa--the celebration.  Essays and photos of feasts and celebrations, such as the Christmas dinner for twenty-seven at a neighbor's house and a donkey race around the church at Montepulciano Stazione, illustrate how the Tuscans celebrate the seasons--their open ways of friendship, their connection to nature, and most of all, their sense of abundance.

Il Campo--the field.  Here Edward Mayes evokes the deep sense of the shift of seasons as he picks olives before he and Frances head off to the olive oil mill and enjoy the first bruscette with new oil.

LaCucina--the kitchen.  An intimate view of the all-important role of the kitchen in Tuscan culture, including photographs of her own kitchen and gardens, menus from great local cooks, the elements of the Tuscan table, dishes with cultural and culinary notes on each, and, of course, delectable recipes.

La Bellezza--the beauty.  From the quality of the light falling on sublime landscapes in different seasons and Tuscan faces in moments of laughter to a silhouette of cypress trees in the early evening and a wild bird perched on a neigbor's head, In Tuscany features views of beauty that reveal the singular splendor of one of the world's best-loved and most artistic regions.

Publishers Weekly

Riding on the success of her previous books, Mayes, who here collaborates with her husband, returns with a curious amalgam of cookbook, coffee-table book, travel guide and memoir. As in Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, Mayes lovingly admires her adopted Tuscany, where she purchased a villa 10 years ago. Chapters are loosely organized around general concepts: for instance, "Baci (Kisses)" focuses on Italian effusiveness; "La Piazza" centers on the meeting place of Italian village life; and "La Festa (Celebration)" opens with a quote from a song by Jovanotti (an Italian pop band) and goes on to classify the many types of celebrations held in Italy, from Siena's Palio to weekly Sunday lunches. Mayes includes 25 recipes throughout the book, though concentrated in the chapters "La Cucina" and "Il Campo." While there are local recipes such as Onion Soup in the Arezzo Style and Chicken Liver on Little Crusts, some of her choices are puzzling. Mayes freely appropriates non-Tuscan items such as Capri's famed limoncello and Parmesan cheese and even provides a recipe for the mirepoix that is the base of many Italian dishes. A list of resources provides a calendar of festivals in the region as well as addresses and phone numbers for bars, restaurants and specialty stores. Kirst's (Spirit of the Place) endearing photos of Tuscan life fill the pages. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Frances Mayes made a name for herself writing about her love affair with Tuscany, where she bought and refurbished an abandoned villa. She tells the full story in Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy (Broadway. 1997. ISBN 0-7679-0038-3. pap. $15); Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy (Broadway. 2000. ISBN 0-7679-0284-X. pap. $15); and In Tuscany (Broadway. 2000. ISBN 0-7679-0535-0. $35). Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Booknews

In her third book about Tuscany, Mayes presents a lush celebration of the region's people, food, landscapes, and art, describing life at home, festivals, feasts, restaurants, and markets. Color photographs, many full page, are by Bob Krist. There is no index or bibliography. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays

Interviews & Essays

"That's one of the things I love best about Italy," I say. "You can so suddenly be dropped behind the time curtain. But the people are totally of this moment so you don't have a feeling of being a time-traveler." I have a gift for her in my bag, but I am waiting.

"I could smell meat sauce cooking all afternoon from the kitchen below. Someone down the street was playing the piano and the leaves seemed to turn overnight. There was a man carrying a wild rabbit over his shoulder," she remembers. "He looked like a figure in a medieval psalter!" She smiles radiantly.

Now I'm remembering my autumns in Tuscany -- pasta with lepre (wild hare) sauce, the aromas of wild mushrooms sizzling in freshly pressed olive oil, the jar of rice infused by an earthy slice of truffle a friend found in the mountains. Also olive-wood fires in the evening and early morning walks on a Roman road in the damp chestnut forest.

Since I have owned and restored Bramasole, a formerly abandoned house in the Tuscan countryside, I have spent 11 summers, several winter semester breaks, a spring, and two falls in that exquisite countryside. Seasons there are not subtle. Spring is riotously spring. Summer is hot as a blast furnace. Each season brings its beauties and seductions. Thrills. Who could choose a favorite? The long fall is a strong contender, from September, when summer breaks and golden light starts to sift over the valleys, through December, when a few roses still glow in the wintry light.

"I thought you romanticized Italy," my friend continues. "You're a poet so I thought you made it all seem soft focus and nice for me. But you didn't! I felt at home there from the minute I stepped into that big piazza in Siena. No words can do justice to that space." She looks at me almost accusingly. "It's even more divine than you said."

I'm not sure if I've been kicked or complimented. I take my present from my bookbag, a copy of my new book, wrapped in Florentine paper. In Tuscany has 150 photos by Bob Krist, his sublime landscapes, markets, piazza life, and faces I particularly love. Since she is just back, and dazzled by Tuscany, I want to give her this gift. I wrote chapters about how intensely Italians celebrate food and seasons; about the pleasures of off-season travel. I included recipes from favorite meals I've eaten at friends' houses. My husband, Ed, wrote about the pleasures of the olive harvest. But my friend looks only at the photo of the famously beautiful piazza in her Siena, with the shadow of a tower falling across the bricks like a sundial. "I had a glass of wine and watched that shadow," she says slowly and to herself. She pauses. "I will always have this place with me."

Driving home from her house, I'm taking in the coastal California hills with afternoon fog roiling over the crests, the evergreens fringing the ridge, the reservoir where two deer are drinking: a landscape to make the heart flip.

We journey through the world and along the way the heart mysteriously expands. A poppy-covered slope or a curve of beach at dawn or an isolated town silhouetted against the sky can become intimately ours. The bells ringing at night, a waitress who throws back her head in a wild laugh, the touch of a saint's robe, the lemon-scent at a shuttered window, the dinner when an owl flies close over your head, the woman in a doorway knitting a red sock. The purest joy of travel is finding those openings your heart can move through.

--Frances Mayes