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Frances Mayes
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Under The Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes Review by Hasmita Chander After reading Toujours Provence, I was eager to step into life in rustic Italy with this book, which was recommended on Amazon.com based on my reviews of the Provence book. It is an absorbing memoir of an American couple, Ed and Frances Mayes, who buy an ancient house in Cortona, Italy, a small village-town where the ancient and the new coexist peacefully. Unlike the usual rich families that like to have a farmhouse in a foreign land but go there and live exactly the way they live in their own country, the Mayeses do in Rome as Romans do. We feel as if we, ourselves, have bought this house, worrying about the pricing and loans, and then renovated and toiled so hard as they did to make the house fit to be lived in. And then we enjoy the fruit of the labour--literally. The house is full of fruit trees, olive trees, grape vines, and all sorts of wild flowers and herbs. Fling a few seeds after you eat the fruit, and the seeds will sprout into plants and trees--the land is so fertile. Frances Mayes shows us the pleasures of life in that distant land--as she says, "thank God they are so different from us". I loved the chapter in which they pluck the olives from their own trees and take them to the mill to get oil from the fruit. "Green oil" she calls it, and when she dunks a slice of bread into it and eats it, I can almost taste the fresh, green flavour myself. She cooks like the locals, learning from the people there. We see the local vegetable and fruit market that has such fresh, clean products that one of the sellers thinks a tourist who asks where to wash an apple he bought from her is weird. A wonderful thing is that Mayes includes a whole set of recipes--I really would love to, except that the ingredients are hard to find here. But the day I get them, I will! Mayes is in love with everything about the place--the history, the culture, the churches and buildings, the vegetation, and, of course, the cuisine. If the reader is not as interested as her, she may find the reading slow in those areas, but otherwise the book is a lovely one. I believe the book has been made into a movie by Touchstone Pictures, starring Diane Lane, but I have not come across the film yet. I will keep an eye open for it now.
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