Frances Mayes

at home in Italy

Under the Tuscan sun

The author details her travels to Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Turkey, Greece, southern Italy, and North Africa, interweaving personal insights with commentary on art, history, landscape, culture, and tradition.

Journeys of a Passionate Traveller

A Year in the World

A lyrical and evocative collection of personal stories from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun, in which the queen of wanderlust reflects on the comforts of home. "A soulful meditation on 'what home means, how it hooks the past and pushes into the future' . . . spellbinding."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) Though Frances Mayes is known for her travels, she has always sought a sense of home wherever she goes. In this poetic testament to the power of place in our lives, Mayes reflects on the idea of home, from the earliest imprint of four walls to the startling discoveries of feeling the strange ease of homes abroad, friends' homes, and even momentary homes that spark desires for other lives. Her musings are all the more poignant after so many have spent their long pandemic months at home. From her travels across Italy--Tuscany, of course, but also Venice and Capri--to the American South, France, and Mexico, Mayes examines the connective tissue among them through the homes she's inhabited. A Place in the World explores Mayes's passion and obsessions with houses and the things that inhabit them--old books, rich food, beloved friends, transportive art. The indelible marks each refuge has left on her and how each home influenced the next serve as the foundations of its chapters. Written in Mayes's signature intimate style, A Place in the World captures the adventure of moving on while seeking comfort in the cornerstone closest to all of us--home.

Finding the Meaning of Home

A Place in the World

A Novel

Women in Sunlight

The author explores life in the idyllic Italian countryside, offering authentic Tuscan recipes and intimately portraying the local people and the environment

The Sweet Life in Italy

Bella Tuscany

The best-selling author of Under the Tuscan Sun shares the story of her youth in the American South and her decision to return to the places that shaped her early ideals, a journey marked by her regional travels and growing appreciation for Southern writers. 80,000 first printing.

A Southern Memoir

Under Magnolia

When a perfect wedding is called off just days before the big event, it sends two people—and their families—reeling, in this poignant novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun and Women in Sunlight A great marriage is an elusive thing, and only a few know the secret to making one. Dara Willcox, in New York for a weekend, meets Austin Clarke at an art gallery. If love at first sight can happen, it happens to them. These two vivid, ambitious people are on different courses—he’s British, working temporarily in New York. She’s from North Carolina, set on law school. They don’t care. They will make their lives together happen. At their April engagement dinner at Dara’s family home, her mother, Lee, sets a beautiful table, and the family and close friends gather to celebrate. Rich, Dara’s father, raises a toast. Suddenly, Lee spills the wine, a brilliant red stain splashing onto the tablecloth and onto Austin. Days later, Austin hears unsettling news from London that wrecks their plans. Dara abruptly cancels the wedding. She refuses to reveal the reason, not even to her best friends or her parents or grandmother, disrupting their family tradition of openness. As everyone knows, Lee and Rich have a great marriage, and Charlotte, her grandmother, had a colossal one, to the late Senator Mann. Charlotte literally wrote the book on the subject: She’s the author of international bestsellers on what makes a good or possibly a great marriage. While Dara escapes to California and Indigo Island, South Carolina, Austin, back in London, faces a major tragedy, the consequences of which are life-altering. But it’s Lee, Dara’s mother, whose impulsive visit to London alters their fate. With her signature warmth, humor, and incisive style, beloved author Frances Mayes creates a multigenerational probe into the complexity of love and the great mystery ride of marriage. A novel of casual choices and fateful consequences, A Great Marriage introduces two unforgettable families and the arrival of a stranger who rearranges their futures.

A Great Marriage

Bestselling and beloved author Frances Mayes discovers the hidden pleasures of Italy in a sumptuous travel narrative that crisscrosses the country, with inventive new recipes celebrating Italian cuisine The Roman Forum, the Leaning Tower, the Piazza San Marco: these are the sights synonymous with Italy. But such landmarks only scratch the surface of this magical country's offerings. In See You in the Piazza, Frances Mayes introduces us to the Italy only the locals know, as she and her husband, Ed, eat and drink their way through thirteen regions--from Friuli to Sicily. Along the way, she seeks out the cultural and historic gems not found in traditional guidebooks. Frances conjures the enchantment of the backstreets, the hubbub of the markets, the dreamlike wonder of that space between lunch and dinner when a city cracks open to those who would wander or when a mind is drawn into the pages of a delicious book--and discloses to us the secrets that only someone who is on intimate terms with a place could find.

New Places to Discover in Italy

See You in the Piazza

The author of Under the Tuscan Sun shares her passion for poetry in an intriguing handbook that takes readers inside the art of reading and writing poems, discussing basic terminology and writing techniques that range from texture and sound to rhyme and repetition, accompanied by a thought-provoking selection of poems that demonstrate the art of poetry. Original. 25,000 first printing.

A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems

The Discovery of Poetry

Place in the World

Bob Krist

Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes

Text and photographs celebrate Tuscany's feasts, festivals, food, wine, people, and culture.

In Tuscany

Swan, Georgie

Un libro entrañable que nos recuerda los placeres de los cuales no debemos prescindir. Después de pasar algunos veranos en Italia y enamorarse de la región de la Toscana, una profesora y poeta norteamericana, decide dejarlo todo y comprar una casa en el campo. Empieza entonces una nueva vida para ella.

Bajo el sol de la Toscana 

تحت شمس توسكانا

Autora dos sucessos Sob o sol da Toscana – que virou filme com Diane Lane – e Bella Toscana, a norte-americana Frances Mayes apresenta agora Todos os dias na Toscana, novo relato de viagens e impressões cotidianas que adquiriu sobre si mesma e sobre o lugar que escolheu para viver. No novo livro, a autora realiza um mergulho nas raízes da região que a fascinou, mesclando a essas impressões memórias de infância e da vida na Califórnia, e discorre com uma prosa saborosa sobre as sensações que emergem de sua estada de mais de 20 anos na Itália.

Todos os Dias de Toscana

A recipe-complemented work continues the author's tribute to the region of Tuscany and its people, tracing the course of a year during which she renovated a thirteenth-century house in the mountains above Cortona.

Seasons of an Italian Life

Every Day in Tuscany

u siebie we Włoszech

Pod słońcem Toskanii

Twenty years ago Frances Mayes, having ended a long marriage and begun a new relationship, was travelling in Italy and happened upon an abandoned, grand but dilapidated three-storey house called 'Bramasole' just outside the Tuscan hillside of Cortona. Mayes fell immediately in love with the house and eventually bought it and began a long and arduous restoration of it. The process of making Bramasole her home - and simultaneously of establishing a new life (and a new outlook on life) in Italy - were the subjects of her bestselling memoirs UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN and BELLA TUSCANY. In the decade since BELLA TUSCANY was published, Mayes has gone from being a proud resident of Cortona to one of its most esteemed citizens as well as Tuscany's literary doyenne. Her books are endlessly devoured and discussed by book groups, her speaking engagements and readings are mobbed, and Bramasole's gates receive daily visits from fans from around the world. In this new memoir Mayes offers her readers another deeply personal account of her present-day life in Tuscany, encompassing both the changes she has experienced since UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN and BELLA TUSCANY appeared, and sensuous, evocative reflections on the timeless, unchanging beauty and simple pleasures of Italian life. Among the themes Mayes examines are how her life in the mountains introduced her to a 'wilder' side of Tuscany and with it a new scale of engagement among Tuscany's mountain people. Throughout she thoughtfully muses on the many concerete joys of building an Italian life: Tuscan icons that connect with her life and have become for her storehouses of memory; crucible moments from which bigger ideas have emerged; how a significant part of her adjustment to Italian metabolism has awakened her to the possibilities in spontaneity and trust in instinc t; and reflections on the writing life she has enjoyed in the room where UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN began and on the wider view she's gained since then.

When the body of her mother, a suicide nineteen years earlier, is mysteriously exhumed, Ginger Mason returns to her small Georgia hometown and is reunited with her reclusive brother as dark secrets about their family begin to surface.

Swan

Together in one set, here are paperback editions of Mayes bestselling books about life in the glorious hills of rural Italy.

Frances Mayes

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