Published by Broadway Books, 1999, 304 pages

Good travel writing is not just about where to go and where to stay: it is about capturing the essence of a place, the things that make it different and familiar. Frances Mayes lives by her own advice to travel writers: Don’t stay in a hotel but live in a place—shop locally, go to the neighborhood cafés and become part of the community. “[T]he deeper you go, the stranger the people become because they’re like you and they’re not.”

For me, that sums up the charm of Bella Tuscany, a love song to Italy, where she bought a run-down house, Bramasole, and did it up (and wrote about it in Under a Tuscan Sun). This book finds her and her husband Ed settled into the house and exploring the country. The couple are university professors in California, so they get away when they can, mostly during the summer holidays.

The book is full of lyrical descriptions and some wonderful incidents. In Palermo, Sicily, they go to a “down-home” restaurant: plain décor, no tablecloth or menu, and harsh lighting. They sit down and the food starts to arrive—plate after plate after plate—including spicy melanzane, “a touch of the Arabic, eggplants with cinnamon and pine nuts”. Eventually, Mayes has to admit defeat, especially when faced with a plate of squid. But the waiter wasn’t having this: he rolls his eyes, “takes my fork, gently grabs a handful of my hair, and starts to feed me. I am so astonished I open my mouth and eat.”

Tradition is very much alive in Italy, and Mayes writes about the overlay of the past on the present. On Good Friday, she joins a procession of the stations of the cross. It is evening, people are carrying candles they shield from the wind.

“Through roving clouds, the full moon comes and goes. I have the strange feeling of having slipped behind a curtain of time and entered a place and ceremony both alien and familiar to me. The music sounds atonal, shrill, almost something you could imagine hearing after death. … We’re all bundled in shapeless raincoats and scarves, further erasing connections with the present time. … [W]e almost could be in the fifteenth century.”

It is not always smooth sailing, however: the outer wall of Bramasole collapses and has to be rebuilt, and visitors are frequent and can be a nuisance, especially when they expect to be fed and don’t offer to help out.

But all of this is worth the joy Mayes gets from the house and the country: she loves the food, the people and the way they live, especially in the more rural areas. There is a connection with the land and the seasons, a sense of not being rushed but taking time to savor the moment. Buying Bramasole was a gamble, but also a life-changing step for Mayes. It opened the door to another way of living and gave her a richness that is immeasurable.  

Read my review of Frances Mayes’s A Year in the World. 

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.