Every Day in Tuscany
“It is paradoxical but true that something that takes you out of yourself also restores you to yourself with greater freedom”- Frances Mayes, ‘Every Day in Tuscany’
I recently attended the Professional Wine Writer’s Symposium in Napa and had the pleasure to hear Frances Mayes, author of ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’, speak about her writing, her life in Italy and how everything changed for her when she decided to buy and restore a house in a foreign country. I also had the opportunity to read, ‘Every Day in Tuscany’ which will be released today. While ’Under the Tuscan Sun’ was about self discovery and learning to view one’s life through a different lens, her latest book published twenty years later captures the sweetness, richness, complexity and challenges of her everyday life in Tuscany.
No memoir of daily life in Tuscany could be complete without focusing on the particular Italian obsession with food. As she follows the changing of the seasons, she offers the reader recipes that perfectly capture each season, from fortifying kale soup in winter to easy rifts on vegetables from their garden in summer. She also manages to capture Tuscany through her lyrical descriptions of food and wine ; “I do try a sip of the Isole e Olena Vin Santo 2000. It tastes like late Thanksgiving afternoon by the fire, a cashmere throw over my legs. Lines of a poem running through by head.”
I loved the section where she introduces her grandson Willie to the pleasures of the table in Italy. As he joyously runs from the garden with a basket of lettuce in hand or learns to wield a knife in the kitchen, you realize that the lessons that Frances Mayes learned when she first moved to Italy are now a part of the fabric of her life. She is no longer the outsider looking in on life in Tuscany. In some essential part of her soul, she has become Tuscan and is passing on the lessons she has learned on how to live life with gusto and joy to her grandson.
As she wanders through the piazza, chats with old friends over grappa or teaches her little grandson how to live la dolce vita she reminds us to appreciate the every day pleasures of our own lives. To slow down and sip a beautiful glass of wine with someone you love. To put on a pot of water to boil for pasta and invite the neighbors over for a festa. To plant a garden filled with delicious things to eat. To really notice the beauty not just in the extraordinary but in the mundane.
“When I am a hundred, propped in the piazza with a bracing glass of grappa, and think back on the happiest times of my life, these evenings in front of the fire, with our tin trays balanced on our knees, the winter soups aroma mixing with the fragrant olive wood, the candles lighted, the decanter half full of black wine, with another day to talk about, wind leaking under the door, and the roasted chestnuts after, Ed shaking them over the embers, peeling fast, and handing me one–these nights to recall are paradigms.” – Frances Mayes -’Every Day in Tuscany’
