Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy

This book is an easy read. However, it made me hungry and craving fennel. It also sorta inspired me to work on our garden. It reads somewhat like a diary of a year in Tuscany with side trips including Sicily. Frances Mayes loves Italy, food , wine , trees and flowers and makes you love it all too.

Very much more of the same from Under the Tuscan Sun but with more travel and more poetry and more philosophical musings.

I really just wanted to hear about the house and their village, so I found myself skimming whenever the chapters covered their travels. I usually love the travel bits, but a combination of my mood and her tendency to write about their trips within Italy the way academic historians write about battles made it all feel too tedious. But I loved hearing about the house, the restoration, re-building the gardens, and harvesting the olives. That took up about half the book, so I went with a down the middle rating of three stars.

I read this book years and years ago. I never posted a review though. "Under the Tuscan Sun" had me wanting to see Italy. And when I was 25 and got to go to Rome, Milan, Turin, and then Florence I was over the moon with happiness. Re-reading this sequel years later brought Italy back to me. The main reason why I gave this 4 stars though is that the book is really slow at times. "Under the Tuscan Sun" had a plot you could follow. A woman and her long time boyfriend/lover/companion visit Italy and fall in love with an abandoned home called Bramasole. We follow them as they start to renovate the house and meet their neighbors.

Mayes takes you through many months she and her now husband experienced in Tuscany and was published 4 years after show more "Under the Tuscan Sun." Mayes and her Ed now go back and forth between Italy and California. They have never had a chance to have "spring" in Tuscany, but this book follows them as they do so. It also follows them as they travel to other parts of Italy. I think the reason why this one didn't resonate with many fans is that the book jumps around a lot. And I mean a lot. We are focused on the repairs to the home, flowers (so many flowers) food, Frances learning Italy, but then their lives in California, Ed's family, France's daughter. It was like we got a journal to follow and there is no real ebb or flow to the book. show less

This book wasn't as polished as "Under the Tuscan Sun". It didn't seem tidied up, but had a very real steak to it- right out of the journals and onto the page without cleansing the raw impressions and thoughts of the author to please mass readers. This made it a bit uneven but that did not detract from the whole for me- perhaps even added to it for this type of book. I found the author to be more of a real person.

I enjoyed Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany is even better. Mayes writes with humor, grace, and sensitivity. The love she feels for her summer home, Bramasole, all of Tuscany, and her Italian neighbors shines through. You are transported through her wonderful exposition on the beauty of the landscape, the joy of the Italian people, and the cornucopia of fine food that she describes throughout Bella Tuscany right to Cortona. La Dolce Vita!

Oh, Italia! How I adore you!

The follow-up to Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany is less about the home Ms. Mayes and her partner have built than their settling into the landscape and community. They spent more time in Italy during this memoir than they did in the last, using up a great deal of vacation time I suspect!

I really enjoyed reading Ms. Mayes descriptions of the Italian landscape; they were as evocative and rich as in her first memoir. They spent more time touring around small Italian towns in this memoir, and a lot more time visiting local wineries and farms. This is what I loved about the sequel, I felt like Ms. Mayes was delving deeper into the Italian mindset; I felt like I better understood the area she was living in this show more time around. I also loved her musings about the Italian language - I've tried to learn Italian too and it's exceptionally difficult!

I know that she has written a third memoir about her life in Italy, and another about traveling to Greece. Big plans to track down copies to read in the sun!

Clearly I highly recommend this memoir. It was beautiful, lyrical, and rich. show less

Frances Mayes takes us back to Bramasole, her home in Tuscany, just as spring comes to Cortona. This time she is with her love Ed; and the home terraces have blossomed, ready for the next phase of planting and design. It is a story of seasons, not just spring, summer fall and winter, it is about the seasons of life: the changes the come expectedly and those that sneak up on us. Bella Tuscany is just the type of book I love to read when the itch to travel is scratched by my lack of funds. So I journey vividly to Italy, and dream about what it would be like to spend a whole summer in this place, or anywhere that I could afford a second home. Also it’s fun to try the recipes she includes, and add the beans and different plants to my show more garden. 4 stars. show less