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Overview
Frances Mayes, whose enchanting #1 New York Times bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites readers back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food, there and throughout 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. 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. Bella Tuscany, a companion volume to Under the Tuscan Sun, is her passionate and lyrical account of her continuing love affair with Italy. 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. It is also a memoir of a season of change, and of renewed possibility. 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. Filled 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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780767902847 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crown Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2000 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 321,319 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.94(w) x 7.63(h) x 0.38(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Primavera
Fortunate that cypress shadows fall in wide bands across the sunlit road; fortunate that on the first day back in Cortona I see a carpenter carrying boards, his tabby cat balanced on his shoulders, tail straight up, riding like a surfer. The carpenter tosses the wood on sawhorses and begins to whistle. The cat bends and leans as he moves—a working cat. I watch for a few moments then walk on into town for a cappuccino. Thank you, I think. Fortunate that yellow blazes of forsythia light the hills. After seven summers on this terraced land, Ed and I feel a rush of happiness on turning the front-door key. I'm enchanted by the rounded Apennines, this quirky house that takes in the sun, and the daily rhythms of life in a Tuscan hilltown. He's far in love with the land. By now he knows the habits of every olive tree.
Fortunate. Otherwise, we might want to post a For Sale sign on the gate ten minutes after arrival because neither well pump is working: a grinding noise in the switch for the old well, a buzz for the new well. We peer into the cistern—at least there's enough water for a few days.
When the pump went down into the new well six years ago, I never expected to see it again. Now, on our first morning, three plumbers are hauling up ropes, their heads down the well. It's a beast. Then Giacomo stands on the well wall, the others beside him. They're counting, uno, due, tre, giving the heave-ho. Soon they're stripped to their pants, cursing and laughing. Up it comes, and Giacomo almost falls backward. They carry it to the truck.
The old well's pump—replaced just last year—they yank out easily. The contraption comes up with fig roots dangling and is pronounced dead on arrival. Why? They begin to dig for wires. By noon, the walkway is torn up, the lawn is carved into ditches and the mystery is solved. Mice have eaten the insulation around the wires. Why would they eat plastic when they can eat hazelnuts and almonds? The pumps have shorted out.
The new well's pump, it turns out, is also dead. Fizzled. Kaput. By the third day, we have new pumps, new wires sealed with silicone, which the original electrician neglected to do, lots of water, a patched walkway, and a depleted bank account. If mice eat plastic, what's to keep them from eating silicone?
Fortunate that we are served pheasant with roasted potatoes for dinner at the trattoria up the mountain, and that the early March dark spills forth a million twirling stars, because otherwise Ed's scrawled list might seem daunting: new grass, prune trees, build a shed for tools, remodel two old bathrooms, new septic system, paint shutters, buy desk and something with space to hang clothes, plant trees, extend garden.
Primo Bianchi, a stonemason who has done extensive work here during our restoration, arrives to discuss the projects. He can start in July. "I was on your roof in January," he tells us. "Your friend Donatella called and said there was a leak." We've seen the dripping stain on the yellow wall of my study. "It was the wind. You lost some tiles. When I was working in the afternoon, the wind came again and blew down my ladder."
"Oh, no!"
He laughs, pointing both forefingers at the ground, that gesture meaning Let it not happen here. Dark comes early in winter. I imagine him, his back against the chimney, sitting on the cold tiles, his pale blue eyes squinting at the road below, the wind standing his hair on end. "I waited. No one came by. Then a car but he did not hear me. After perhaps two hours a woman walked by and I called for help. This house was empty so long—she thought I was a spirit and let out a scream when she saw me waving on the roof. You need to think of a new roof soon."
He walks off a measurement of pipes we'll need for the new drainage system. It looks like a plan for trench warfare. "Hurry and order the furnishings for the bathrooms if you want everything here by July."
Fortunate that the place is restored—central heating, new doors, finished kitchen, one lovely bath, refinished beams, barrels of new paint, rebuilt stone walls, refitted cantina for oil and wine. Otherwise, these new projects might seem like restoration itself. "You may think you're through with old houses," Primo tells us, "but they are never through with you."
Soft spring air, an elixir of joy simply to breathe in and out. Quick streams are opening on the terraces. I take off my shoes and let the cold, cold water bathe my feet. The rocky hillsides sprout ferns, glossy green. A new lizard runs across my toes and I feel the clutch of the tiny feet.
Primavera, first green, and the wet grasses shine. A European spring, my first. I only have read of Proust's chestnuts flowering, Nabokov's linden lanes, Colette's double-red violets. But no one ever told me about quince, their sudden pink flares against stone walls. No one said the spring winds can turn murderous. No one mentioned lilac, and somehow during my summers in Italy, I never noticed the heart-shaped leaves. Now I see the Tuscan hills spattered with enormous white or smoky-lavender bushes. Near our house, a hedge of lilac leads to an abandoned farm, and in the rain I cut wet armfuls to fill all my pitchers and vases. More than any flower, the mesmerizing perfume seems to be the very scent of memory, hauling me back to college in Virginia and my first breath of lilac, which didn't grow in the warm latitude of my childhood home in Georgia. I remember thinking, How could I have lived eighteen years without knowing this? I had a terrible crush on my philosophy professor, married with three children, and over and over I played Harry Bellafonte, Green grow the lilacs all sparkling with dew. My dorm window overlooked the James River through a tangle of brush. Springtime is here and it's here without you. That my professor wore drip-dry shirts I crassly blamed on his wife; that he combed a long strand of hair over his pate I tried to ignore.
Violets, the suffocatingly sweet-scented ones, bloom along the spontaneous springs. Naturalized double daffodils, tromboni in Italian, mass along the terrace edges. The faint mists of hawthorn (biancospino, white thorn, or, locally, topospino, mouse-pricker) drift along the upper terraces and, below, the fruit trees continue to outdo themselves. We won't mow—the luxurious grass is overtaken by white camomile and marguerites.
What is this happiness that keeps coming in waves? Time, the gift of time, the free running of time—and Italy owns so much of it. Being from the South, I'm used to people talking about The War Between the States as though it were a decade ago. In the South the long dead and buried are talked about, too. Sometimes I thought Mother Mayes would come walking in the door again, bringing back her powdery lavender scent, her spongy body I could feel beneath the voile print dress. Here, it's Hannibal. Hannibal, who passed this way and fought the Roman Flaminio in 217 B.C. All the hilltowns celebrate jousts or weddings or battles which occurred hundreds of years ago. Maybe having so much time behind them contributes to the different sense I absorb in Italy. Gradually, I fall into time. At home in California, I operate against time. My agenda, stuffed with notes and business cards, is always with me, each day scribbled with appointments. Sometimes when I look at the week coming up, I know that I simply have to walk through it. To be that booked-up, blocked-in feels depleting. When I make the weekly list of what needs to be accomplished, I know I'll be running double-time to catch up. I don't have time to see my friends and sometimes when I do, I'm hoping to cut it short because I need to get back to work. I read about an American doctor who pumps her breasts in freeway traffic so she can continue to breast-feed her baby and still keep up with her medical practice. An ad in The Wall Street Journal offered engagement rings by telephone for couples who don't have time to shop. Am I that bad?
Sabbatical, what a civilized idea. All jobs should have them. This year both Ed and I have this blessed time-out, which, combined with summer vacation, gives us the chance to spend six months in Italy. Since this is my first leave in twenty years of teaching, I want to bask in every day. To wake up—without having to go anywhere—and wander the terraces to see what is coming into bloom seems like paradiso. Soon the wild irises will open. Their pointy, bruise-blue heads seem to push up taller as I watch. Narcissi, just on the verge of glory, run rampant. Already, yellow light emanates from the buds.
I am, every day, shocked by something new and shocked that this house and land, which I thought I knew from my summers and Decembers, continue to astound me. We stepped off the plane in Florence on March 15 to seventy-degree weather and it has held, except for occasional blasts of wind. Now, the pears are turning from flower to leaf. As white petals drop or flurry—I remember hearing "peach-blow" as a child—new leaves shoot out with force. That energy has swollen the limbs of all the old fig trees and the branches of the spindly pomegranate we have just planted.
Happiness? The color of it must be spring green, impossible to describe until I see a just-hatched lizard sunning on a stone. That color, the glowing green lizard skin, repeats in every new leaf. "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower . . ." Dylan Thomas wrote. "Fuse" and "force" are excellent word choices—the regenerative power of nature explodes in every weed, stalk, branch. Working in the mild sun, I feel the green fuse of my body, too. 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.
A momentous change has occurred at Bramasole. "Can you find someone to take care of the place?" I asked signor Martini at the end of last summer. We were leaving and had no one to keep the rampant forces of nature at bay in our garden. Francesco and Beppe, who've worked this land for several years, only want to care for fruit trees, grapes, and olives. Once we asked Beppe to cut the grass. He wielded his weed machine as though clearing brambles, leaving the yard looking like a dust bowl. When he and Francesco saw the lawn mower Ed bought, they took a couple of steps back and said, "No, no, professore, grazie." They, men of the fields, did not see themselves pushing the little humming mower across some lawn.
Signor Martini, who sold us the house, knows everyone. Perhaps some friend would like a part-time job.
He pushed back from his desk and pointed to his chest. "Io," he pronounced. "I will make the garden." He took down something framed above his desk, blew off the dust on top, and held out his agricultural diploma. A small photo stuck in the corner of the frame showed him at twenty with his hand on the rump of a cow. He grew up on a farm and always missed the country life he'd known as a boy. After World War II, he sold pigs before moving to town and taking up real estate. Because he is eligible for a pension, he planned to close his office at the end of the year, he explained, and was moving to a large estate as caretaker. Because so many Italians start work in their teens, they become pensionati, pensioners, while still relatively young. He wanted to make a mid-course correction.
Usually we arrive at the end of May, when it's too late to plant vegetables. By the time we've cleared a space, turned the soil, and bought seeds, the planting season has left us behind. We look longingly at the fagiolini, string beans, climbing tepees of bamboo in our neighbors' gardens. If a few tomato plants happen to survive our ineptitude and lateness, we sit staring at the runty green blobs the morning of our leaving for San Francisco, shaking our heads at the unfulfilled dream of snapping luscious tomatoes from our own labor.
Now, signor Martini has metamorphosed into a gardener. A couple of times a week, he comes here to work, often bringing his sister-in-law as well.
Every day involves a trip to a nursery—we've visited every one within twenty miles—or a walk around the terraces and yard sketching possible gardens. Winter rains have softened the soil so that I sink slightly as I walk. Since we're here in time, I aim to have the most riotous, flamboyant, flourishing garden this side of the Boboli in Florence. I want every bird, butterfly, and bee in Tuscany to feel drawn to my lilies, surfinias, jasmine, roses, honeysuckle, lavender, anemones, and to the hundred scents drifting from them. Even though the risk of freeze is still a consideration, I barely can restrain myself from planting. In the nursery greenhouses, the humid air and the narcotizing effect of bright geraniums, hydrangeas, petunias, impatiens, begonias, and dozens of other rosy pinks and corals, entice me to load the car immediately.
"Whoa, slow down," Ed says. "We should buy only what we can plant now, the lavender, rosemary, and sage." These replace what was damaged by the paralyzing winter storm, when it snowed, melted, then froze all in one day. "And more trees can be planted immediately. There's plenty of time."
Plenty of time. What a musical phrase.
Even the spring night is shocking. The silence of the country sounds loud. I'm not yet accustomed to the shrieks of owls tearing apart the stillness. We're coming from burrito-and-a-movie nights, order-out-for-Chinese nights, seventeen-messages-on-the-answering-machine nights. I wake up at three or four and wander from room to room, looking out the windows. What is this quiet, the big, moony night with a comet ball smearing my study window and the dark valley below? Why can't I erase the image my student wrote: the comet, like a big Q-tip swabbing the sky? A nightingale practices some nightingale version of scales, lingering on each note. This seems to be a lone bird; no answer comes to the plaintive song.
Late every afternoon, Ed hauls in olive wood. We have supper on trays in front of the fire. "Now, we're back," he says, raising his glass to the flames, perhaps to the humble god of the hearth. Happiness, divine and banal word, a complex proposition which shifts its boundaries constantly, and sometimes feels so very easy. I pull a blanket around me and doze over Italian idioms. A wind comes up. Which one? The tramontana, tinged with frigid air from the Alps, the ponente, bringing rain, or the levante, blowing hard and fast from the east? The cypresses outlined by moonlight seem to swirl their pointed tops in all directions. Certainly it is not the libeccio, the warm, dry wind from the south, or the summery grecale or maestrale. These winds in the chimney are serious, reminding me that in March, spring is only an idea.
Reading Group Guide
The questions that follow are intended to enhance your reading group's discussion, and we hope that they will also help you discover new and personal lines of inquiry into this wonderful memoir of friendships, festivity, and food in Italy.
1. Mayes writes, "It can be dangerous to travel. A strong reflecting light is cast back on 'real life,' sometimes a disquieting experience." What does she mean? How does travel change your perception of yourself? Has a hidden piece of your identity ever been revealed to you through travel?
2. While in Sicily, Mayes connects existential thoughts of death with traveling. "Why am I here where I don't belong? What is this alient place? I fell I'm in a strange afterlife, a haint blowing with the winds. I suspect the subtext to this displacement is the dread of death. Who and where are you when you are no one?" Do these thoughts of displacement enter your mind when you travel? Do you think they are connected to a fear of death?
3. How is Mayes's trip to Sicily different from her travels in Tuscany and the Veneto? What are specific traits of the Sicilian character? What in Sicily's history can account for these traits? Are there regional differences in your own country that are as vivid?
4. At one of the many extravagant feasts he attends throughout the book, Ed remarks, speaking of the bitter after-dinner drinks called amari, "Italians seem to have acquired more tastes than many of us." Do you agree? Why might that be the case? How is Italy's relationship to food different from that of other countries?
5. On a number of occasions, Mayes describes the many elaborate gestures Italians have for expressing how good food is. Do any of them make sense to you? How many gestures do you have to show your enjoyment of food? How often do you use these gestures? What does it mean to frequently express your appreciation of food through physical gestures? What does that say about a culture?
6. Why do you think Mayes includes recipes in her book? What is the effect of the recipes on you, the reader? Does it bring her story more alive? If so, how? Do you intend to make any of the dishes? Which ones? Is your interest in these specific dishes connected to Mayes's narrative?
7. Throughout her travels in Italy, Mayes frequently encounters ancient Roman and Etruscan monuments. How does the historical scope of Italy change her perception of time? Does it change yours just by reading about the ancient landscape? How do you think growing up, surrounded by so much ancient history, would change a person? Do you see those differences in the Italians that Mayes encounters? How do these Italians feel about their heritage?
8. Mayes writes of the balance between "ambition, solitude, stimulation, adventure...What is replenishing? What is depleting? What takes? What gives? What wrings you out and, truly, what rinses you with happiness?" Do you think restoring Bramasole in the summers and teaching the rest of the year in San Francisco is a good balance? What balance have you struck? Are you content with it?
9. What is the relationship of the foraging woman, who used to work at Bramasole, to the estate now? Is she trespassing when she picks their fruits and mushrooms? How is the sense of land ownership profoundly different in Tuscany than in Mayes's native California?
10. Mayes writes, "The garden, I begin to see, is a place where I can give memory a location and season in which to remain alive...Scents operate like music and poetry, stirring up wordless feelings that rush through the body, not as cognitive thoughts but as a surge of lymphatic tide." What do your plants or garden mean to you? Is your garden a repository of memories of places, events, or loved ones? Do you use scents to remember?
11. Quoting a haiku from Basho, Mayes writes, "Deep Autumn,My neighbor, howDoes he live, I wonder?" Why do you think Mayes travels? Why do you? Does your urge to travel change as you get older? What inspires you to leave your home and wander?
12. What is the relationship Italians have with art? How does Mayes attempt to emulate that relationship? What role does art play in your day-to-day life? How do you access art in your everyday existence?
13. How is Mayes's rose garden in conflict with Anselmo's olive trees? Why do you think the olive trees are so important to Anselmo? Is there a larger issue at stake here?
14. Mayes writes that, "Multilingual friends assure me that a new personality emerges when one acquires a new language." Have you experienced that, or seen it in others? Do you see a change in Mayes over the course of her year spent on sabbatical in Tuscany?
15. Mayes asks, "What can we take back [from Tuscany] to our lives in the new house [in California]? What accounts for the dramatic shift in our minds and bodies when we live [in Tuscany]?" How do you incorporate life lessons you've learned in your travels, or while on vacation? How do you infuse your daily working life with the spirit of Tuscany? What specific, concrete changes in your life did BELLA TUSCANY inspire?
16. Why do you think Mayes was unable to recognize her ex-husband at the rehearsal dinner fo their daughter's marriage? Has your world ever been so transformed as to make the past unrecognizable?
17. BELLA TUSCANY brings the Tuscan countryside so vividly to life. As you journey through Tuscany with Mayes, through a year of changing seasons, what specific images have left an indelible imprint on your mind? Have you been to Tuscany? Do you plan on returning?
18. Bramasole is in perpetual need of repair. Mayes's restoration work will never end. Would she have been better off buying a more modern villa? What is her attraction to dilapidated buildings? Do you share it? If you restore your own house, does it change your relationship to it? How so?
Interviews
bn InterviewQ: You write in your preface to Bella Tuscany that the last line of your first memoir was the first line of your new book. Did you realize right away there would be a sequel to Under the Tuscan Sun?
A: I just kept writing; I wasn't really thinking in terms of a sequel, because I think when you start in on a project you can never quite know where it's going to go. But I realized then that I was still writing the beginning of my experiences in Italy, and I just kept writing. It seemed like a natural continuation.
Q: When you were writing Bella Tuscany, did you feel a lot of pressure to write a sequel that would be as beloved by readers as Under the Tuscan Sun?
A: I didn't, I guess, because I worked for so many years as a poet, and you know exactly what that's like. So I really never had that many expectations when Under the Tuscan Sun was published; it was kind of a miracle to me that it became a bestseller and so popular. I am inclined toward miracles, but I wasn't thinking in terms of a second one. A lot of those things are very exterior to the writing process, and when you're writing, I, at least, don't think in terms particularly of what's going to happen to it until it's finished.
Q: Did you ever even imagine Under the Tuscan Sun would do as well as it did, and what was your reaction to the high praise by both reviewers and readers?
A: No, I never ever expected it -- I hoped people would like it. My original publisher, Chronicle Books, only published 5,000 copies. They never expected much of it either, and they never led me to expect very much. They thought it would be a nice little memoir that some people might like, but they, and I, underestimated the great love a lot of people have for Italy. Also, with my correspondence with people, a whole lot of readers reacted to something unexpected. That is, the risk of a woman in midlife taking on a project like this and making a big change. I didn't expect the success, but I have absolutely had a marvelous time. It's been great fun. A lot of friends of mine who are writers say [negatively], "Oh, I've got to go on a book tour," and I was saying [happily], "Oh! I get to go on a book tour!"
Q: Did you get a lot of feedback after writing your first memoir?
A: Oh, yeah. I still am getting tons of mail, and I think to me that's been the biggest pleasure of the whole experience -- the letters I've gotten. I get a lot of emails, and the art of plain old letter writing is still alive. That's been great. And of course, a lot of people have been coming up to my house in Italy.
Q: How does that make you feel?
A: Well, it hasn't been a problem yet. I hope it never will be. I think the people who have read my book are really nice people. They are not invasive. They usually take a picture, and if I am out or my husband is out in the yard working, we chat and they go on. A few people have been invasive -- like three or four -- but mostly it's just been a pleasant experience so far.
Q: I read that the sequel was going to be called The Sweet Life. Is there a reason you decided to call it Bella Tuscany instead?
A: The Sweet Life was my title, but the publishers didn't like the title. They thought it was too soft. [The publishers] came up with [Bella Tuscany], and I liked it, as long as I got to keep my subtitle [The Sweet Life In Italy]. I wanted "the sweet life" in there because I went to Italy really expecting adventure (when I bought the house in 1990), and I began putting a piece of my life there every year, and I just expected it to be a big adventure, and it is. But what I didn't expect was how utterly wonderful everyday life is. Just the pure everyday. I liked "the sweet life" for that. La dolce vita was used by Fellini in kind of an ironic way, but before Fellini ever used the expression, it was an Italian expression that was not ironic in any way, and I was going back to the original usage of that expression.
Q: Your book has been classified as armchair travel. But when I was reading it, I thought of it as so much more than that; it's about gardening, imagery, lyrical poetry, and cooking. I've spoken to more than one reader who calls you "Martha Stewart-esque." First of all, how would you categorize your Italian memoirs, and how do you view yourself?
A: I could never make a cranberry wreath. I don't really know much about Martha Stewart, but I do have a kind of passion for houses, and I guess she does too. To me the book is a memoir, but it is also a travel book. Travel writing is one of my favorite genres. I have always read a lot in that area. I love Freya Stark and Ann Cornelisen and D. H. Lawrence's travel books; I just love the genre, and I think armchair travel is kind of a dismissive title, because it seems to me that the very good travel books have an outer journey but also have an inner journey that parallels that outer journey. Those are the kinds of travel books that I have always loved to read. I think mine falls into that kind of category because it was an inner journey for me to change my life, and at the same time, it was confronting a foreign country and being a traveler there. So I think of it as a memoir-travel book in the same breath.
Q: What kinds of books do you enjoy reading? Also, what travel books do you recommend for barnesandnoble.com readers?
A: I love Ann Cornelisen's books Torre Greca and Women of the Shadows. I love all of Freya Stark's books. She was a very eccentric Englishwoman who set out to travel in what is now Iraq and Iran back in the '20s and '30s, and those are beautiful. Really beautiful.
Q: I understand that one of the things you wish you had done before buying your house in Italy was taking an immersion language class. Do you now speak Italian fluently, and do you ever write any of your poetry or anything in Italian?
A: I don't write in Italian. I do wish we had studied more before we got into that project. I had taken a one-month immersion class in Siena. Ed and I both thought that we did pretty well. But then when we got to Cortona and got into this project, we realized right in our faces how many people in Italy still speak in dialect, so we were really stumbling around. We've kind of learned as we've gone, and we're always listening to tapes. We work with a tutor there. We can speak Italian, but it's going to take the rest of our lives to be what I call "fluent."
Q: Was it difficult for you and Ed to learn Italian?
A: The thing with learning a language, I've found, [is that] the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. And so it feels like slow progress, and now and then you make these little breakthroughs. Sometimes you think, Oh, I didn't even realize he was speaking Italian; I was just listening. Not translating. That happens now.
Q: Do you ever read any books in Italian?
A: We're always trying. We go and come so much, like when I get back here, and launch into teaching; I really don't have time to study Italian. It's always somewhat of a -- not a cold start over, but it's not like we get to have that feeling of immersion. Last year we were there for six months, and we learned so much. I would just love to have a year there to be able to really study. It's hard to restore a house, travel, write books, teach, and study Italian. Do your taxes, get your hair cut.
Q: I loved the section of Bella Tuscany about your Aunt Hazel and you and your sisters going out for lunch. It was so touching, some of the memories you include of growing up or of just being around your family. This book is being promoted as an Italian memoir, but it's much more than that. What do you really think is at the heart of this book?
A: For me what was at the heart of it is writing, because it connects to everyday life, but it's just below the surface of that. It's the question of what is happiness? How does happiness happen? Sometimes it's extremely simple, and other times it involves something like taking very big risks. Because my life is divided between these two places and so many of my memories are of the South, I think the memoir aspect of the book has to bring all those aspects together. If I was just writing about Italy or [just writing] a travel book, I don't think I would go into my layers of memory about other places. In trying to understand who you are in a new place, I think you bring forward who you are in other places, as well. I can't be in Italy without thinking of my life here and my life growing up and how they interact.
Q: Do you think you've found happiness in Italy? Does that make you really happy now?
A: It's an amazing experience. The minute I get there, I feel like something has lifted off of me. I don't know if it's that big ole Mediterranean sun or the rhythm of the day or the food or the people or the whole thing -- I do have this kind of euphoric feeling there. And I am constantly happy here in San Francisco, even on the foggiest of days. Something different happens there. For me, I think I've found my place. I think different people really respond to different places and have a kind of metabolic connection with the particular place or landscape. I've heard in letters from people, "I've found my soul house in Montana or Florida or wherever." Lots of people have written me about their houses and their connections with their place, which is a landscape. For me, I think that it happens to be Italy.
Q: What do you relish most about everyday life in Italy?
A: Oh, that's such a hard question. I think the long days; the rhythm of the day seems like it gives you more time than the rhythm of the day here, where I and most of my friends are so addicted to work. Everything gets eaten up all the time. There they have that lovely siesta in the middle of the day, that nice long pause, and it kind of seems to give you two days in one. I think that's really my favorite thing. I have time to write, and I have time to do everything else I want to do. I am not always scrambling around for time.
Q: Do you think you will retire in Italy or split your time between there and San Francisco? Or is there another destination where you see yourself?
A: Oh, what a good idea! I would like to think there's another destination. I don't know. I don't think I would ever live in Italy full time because I think for me as a writer I would not want to cut myself off from my language. Language is changing all the time, and I think if you cut yourself off from it, it's dangerous as a writer, although I probably would go back and forth. My daughter lives here, and all of my friends are here, and I think I will always go back and forth as long as I can grab a cane and get on a plane.
Q: What is the one essential item that you advise all travelers to pack with them when they go on vacation?
A: For me it would be a notebook. You can always buy a notebook, but that's one piece of equipment I always have with me. Otherwise you forget so much if you don't write it down. I've lost whole trips, practically. You remember the outlines of it, but you don't remember the things you would really love to have a record of.
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