They have never had a chance to have 'spring' in Tuscany, but this book follows them as they do so. Mayes takes you through many months she and her now husband experienced in Tuscany and was published 4 years after 'Under the Tuscan Sun.' Mayes and her Ed now go back and forth between Italy and California. We follow them as they start to renovate the house and meet their neighbors. A woman and her long time boyfriend/lover/companion visit Italy and fall in love with an abandoned home called Bramasole.

'Under the Tuscan Sun' had a plot you could follow. The main reason why I gave this 4 stars though is that the book is really slow at times. Re-reading this sequel years later brought Italy back to me. And when I was 25 and got to go to Rome, Milan, Turin, and then Florence I was over the moon with happiness. 'Under the Tuscan Sun' had me wanting to see Italy. As spring becomes summer she revives Bramasole's lush gardens, meets the challenges of learning a new language, tours regions from Sicily to the Veneto, and faces transitions in her family life.įilled with recipes from her Tuscan kitchen and written in the sensuous and evocative prose that has become her hallmark, Bella Tuscany is a celebration of the sweet life in Italy. It is also a memoir of a season of change, and of renewed possibility. Now truly at home there, Mayes writes of her deepening connection to the land, her flourishing friendships with local people, the joys of art, food, and wine, and the rewards and occasional heartbreaks of her villa's ongoing restoration. A sabbatical from teaching in San Francisco allowed her to return to Cortona-and her beloved house, Bramasole-just as the first green appeared on the rocky hillsides.īella Tuscany, a companion volume to Under the Tuscan Sun, is her passionate and lyrical account of her continuing love affair with Italy. Having spent her summers in Tuscany for the past several years, Frances Mayes relished the opportunity to experience the pleasures of primavera, an Italian spring. Surges of energy, kaleidoscopic sunlight through the leaves, the soft breeze that makes me want to say the word 'zephyr'-this mindless simplicity can be called happiness.

Working in the mild sun, I feel the green fuse of my body, too. The regenerative power of nature explodes in every weed, stalk, branch. That color, the glowing green lizard skin, repeats in every new leaf. Happiness? The color of it must be spring green, impossible to describe until I see a just-hatched lizard sunning on a stone. An alternate cover edition of this ISBN can be found here.įrances Mayes invites us back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food there and throughout Italy.įrances Mayes, whose enchanting #1 New York Times bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites us back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food there and throughout Italy.

Frances mayes books