Marlena de Blasi

The next volume of memoir from the author of the international bestseller A Thousand Days in Venice introduces the extraordinary Antonia, imperious matriach of four generations of strong-willed Tuscan women The renovations to 34 via del Duomo now complete, Marlena de Blasi, the bestselling international author and "the woman with the fairy-tale life" needs to find time and space to finish a book. Lured by the offer of a simple stone cottage in the remote, mountainous region of western Tuscany, distant from the distractions of her everyday life with Fernando in Orvieto, she sets off for some much-needed solitude. But her plans to live simply, in peace and quiet, are overturned when she meets the imperious, tempestuous Antonia, the still-stunning, elderly matriarch of a large, complicated family of four generations of beautiful blue-eyed Italian women, all with stories and ideas of their own. Antonia dislikes tourists and outsiders, and so Marlena at first spars and clashes with her before they reach an understanding. Over feasts and family dinners, walking in the dark before sunrise to harvest wild lettuces, preparing meals and exchanging recipes, the two women joust, joke, exchange confidences, and grow closer and closer until finally Antonia reveals the terrible secrets behind the vivid beauty of Il Castelleto. Evocative, powerful, and haunting, this is a compelling insight into Italy's recent past and a revealing glimpse into one extraordinary woman's story and her kitchen.

Antonia and Her Daughters

A tale of love, food, renovations, recipes and wine from the author of the best-selling A Thousand Days in Venice. A lush and evocative account of when Marlena moved with her beloved Fernando to the beautiful town of Orvieto, in Umbria.

Coming Home to Via Del Duomo

An Umbrian Love Story

An American chef meets the love of her life among the beautiful canals and exquisite cuisine of Venice—“better than a romance novel, it’s the real thing” (New Orleans Times-Picayune). Fernando first sees Marlena across the Piazza San Marco and falls in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later, he knows it’s fate. He knows little English; she, a divorced American chef traveling through Italy, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thought she was done with romantic love, incapable of intimacy. Yet within months of their first meeting, she quits her job, sells her house in St. Louis, kisses her two grown sons goodbye, and moves to Venice to marry “the stranger,” as she calls Fernando. This deliciously satisfying memoir is filled with the foods and flavors of Italy and peppered with culinary observations and recipes. But the main course here is an enchanting true story about a woman who falls in love with both a man and a city, and finally finds the home she didn’t even know she was missing. “An irresistible grown-up love story.” —USA Today

An Unexpected Romance

A Thousand Days in Venice

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “At villa Donnafugata, long ago is never very far away,” writes bestselling author Marlena de Blasi of the magnificent if somewhat ruined castle in the mountains of Sicily that she finds, accidentally, one summer while traveling with her husband, Fernando. There de Blasi is befriended by Tosca, the patroness of the villa, an elegant and beautiful woman-of-a-certain-age who recounts her lifelong love story with the last prince of Sicily descended from the French nobles of Anjou. Sicily is a land of contrasts: grandeur and poverty, beauty and sufferance, illusion and candor. In a luminous and tantalizing voice, That Summer in Sicily re-creates Tosca’s life, from her impoverished childhood to her fairy-tale adoption and initiation into the glittering life of the prince’s palace, to the dawning and recognition of mutual love. But when Prince Leo attempts to better the lives of his peasants, his defiance of the local Mafia’s grim will to maintain the historical imbalance between the haves and the have-nots costs him dearly. The present-day narrative finds Tosca sharing her considerable inherited wealth with a harmonious society composed of many of the women–now widowed–who once worked the prince’s land alongside their husbands. How the Sicilian widows go about their tasks, care for one another, and celebrate the rituals of a humble, well-lived life is the heart of this book. Showcasing the same writerly gifts that made bestsellers of A Thousand Days in Venice and A Thousand Days in Tuscany, That Summer in Sicily, and de Blasi’ s marvelous storytelling, remind us that in order to live a rich life, one must embrace both life’s sorrow and its beauty. Here is an epic drama that takes readers from Sicily’s remote mountains to chaotic post-war Palermo, from the intricacies of forbidden love to the havoc wreaked by Sicily’s eternally bewildering culture.

A Love Story

That Summer in Sicily

American chef and author of A Thousand Days in Venice moves to rural Tuscany, where she and her husband discover village secrets of food, life, and love. Searching for the rhythms of country living, American chef Marlena de Blasi and her Venetian husband, Fernando, move to a barely renovated former stable in Tuscany. They dwell among two hundred villagers, ancient olive groves, and hot Etruscan springs. In this patch of earth where Tuscany, Umbria, and Lazio collide, there is much to feed de Blasi’s two passions—food and love. In A Thousand Days in Tuscany, de Blasi brings us along as she and Fernando harvest grapes, gather chestnuts, forage for wild mushrooms, and climb trees in the cold of December to pick olives, one by one. They befriend the mesmeric Barlozzo, a self-styled village chieftain whose stories lead de Blasi deeper into the soul of Tuscany. Together they visit sacred festivals and taste just-pressed olive oil, drizzled over roasted country bread. In a cauldron set over a wood fire, they braise beans in red wine, and a stew of wild boar simmers overnight in the ashes of their hearth. Barlozzo shares his knowledge of Italian farming traditions and ancient health potions, but he has secrets he doesn’t share, and one of them concerns the beautiful Floriana, whose illness teaches Marlena that happiness is truly a choice. Like the pleasurable tastes and textures of a fine meal, A Thousand Days in Tuscany is as satisfying as it is enticing. The author’s own recipes are included.

A Bittersweet Adventure

A Thousand Days in Tuscany

Ele viu-a do outro lado da Piazza San Marco e apaixonou-se à distância. Um ano mais tarde, quando volta a vê-la num café em Veneza, sabe que é o destino. Ele fala mal inglês; ela, uma chef americana divorciada, só fala italiano relacionado com comida. Marlena está convencida de não estar preparada para a intimidade, de que o seu coração perdeu a capacidade de se entregar a um amor romântico. Mas, alguns meses depois do seu primeiro encontro, ela faz as malas e deixa a sua casa em Saint Louis para casar com Fernando - «o estranho», como lhe chama - e viver na cidade dolorosamente encantadora em que se conheceram. Entusiasmada mas vagamente desorientada por esta atitude ousada, Marlena sente-se esmagada pela completa estranheza da sua nova casa, dos seus rituais e costumes. Mas há momentos deliciosos em que Veneza abre os braços a Marlena. Ela cozinha um festim americano de caviar do Mississipi, broa de milho e cebola frita para os habitantes locais... e dança o tango que aprendeu no ginásio da escola preparatória de Poughkeepsie numa trattoría iluminada por velas perto da Ponte Rialto. Entretanto, ela e Fernando, duas almas díspares, constroem uma vida extraordinária de paixão e possibilidades. Contendo as receitas incríveis da própria Marlena, Mil Dias em Veneza é a história encantadora de uma mulher que abre o seu coração - e se apaixona por um homem e por uma cidade.

Mil Dias em Veneza

'If you loved Under the Tuscan Sun, you’ll love this' Red Magazine Every week on a Thursday evening, a group of four rural Italian women gather in an old stone house in the hills above Italy’s Orvieto. There – along with their friend, Marlena – they cook together, sit down to a beautiful supper, drink their beloved local wines, and talk. Surrounded by candle light, good food and friendship, the four women tell Marlena their evocative life stories, and of cherished ingredients and recipes whose secrets have been passed down through generations.

The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club

The only sauce is olive oil - green as sun - struck jade - splashed in small lustrous puddles, through which one skates the flesh, the fat, the bones, the potatoes, the bread. In the last, best drops, one skates a finger.' Luscious and evocative, The Umbrian Supper Club recounts the stories of a small group of Umbrian women who - sometimes with their men and, as often, without them - gather in an old stone house in the hills above Orvieto to cook, to sit down to a beautiful supper, to drink their beloved local wines. And to talk. During the gathering, the preparation, the cooking and the eating, they recount the memories and experiences of their gastronomic lives and, as much, of their more personal histories. For a period of four years, it was Marlena de Blasi's task, her pleasure, to cook for the Supper Club - to choose the elements for supper, to plan the menu and, with the help of one or another of the women in the club, to prepare the meal. What she learnt, what they cooked and ate and drank and how they talked is the fundamental stuff of this book. Including a dozen recipes, drawn from the Supper Club, The Umbrian Supper Club is a delight to read and to taste.

The Umbrian Supper Club

'The only sauce is olive oil - green as sun-struck jade - splashed in small lustrous puddles, through which one skates the flesh, the fat, the bones, the potatoes, the bread. In the last, best drops, one skates a finger.' Luscious and evocative, The Umbrian Supper Club recounts the stories of a small group of Umbrian women who - sometimes with their men and, as often, without them - gather in an old stone house in the hills above Orvieto to cook, to sit down to a beautiful supper, to drink their beloved local wines. And to talk. During the gathering, the preparation, the cooking and the eating, they recount the memories and experiences of their gastronomic lives and, as much, of their more personal histories. For a period of four years, it was Marlena de Blasi's task, her pleasure, to cook for the Supper Club - to choose the elements for supper, to plan the menu and, with the help of one or another of the women in the club, to prepare the meal. What she learnt, what they cooked and ate and drank and how they talked is the fundamental stuff of this book. Including a dozen recipes, drawn from the Supper Club, The Umbrian Supper Club is a delight to read and to taste.

Marlena de Blasi, the acclaimed author of such delectable memoirs as A Thousand Days in Venice and That Summer in Sicily, now brings her luminous prose to the world of fiction with this remarkable debut novel. Set against the backdrop of Europe as it moves inexorably toward World War II, Amandine follows a young orphan’s journey in search of her heritage. The story opens in Krakow in 1931, as a baby girl is conceived out of wedlock, the byproduct of a foolish heart and a tragic inheritance. The child’s grandmother, a countess, believes that she is protecting her daughter when she claims that the baby didn’t survive. In truth, however, she deposits the infant at a remote convent in the French countryside, leaving her with a great sum of money and in the care of a young governess named Solange. Solange takes it upon herself to give the child a distinctive name, Amandine, and the two form a special bond. But even Solange’s unconditional love cannot protect her charge. Mistrusted by both the abbess and the convent girls, the unusually astute and curious Amandine finds her childhood filled with challenges and questions: Who is she? Where does she come from? Eventually, Solange is forced to choose between the terrors of the convent and those of a global war looming outside its doors. Thus, with a purseful of worthless francs and a sack of provisions, the two flee north toward Solange’s childhood home. But what should have been a two-day journey by train becomes a perilous, years-long odyssey across Occupied France—and deeper into the treacheries of war. Tracing the flight of Amandine and Solange while peering into the lives of the countess and her daughter, Amandine’s mother, who still mourns and dreams of the child she thinks she lost forever, Marlena de Blasi’s epic novel winds its way toward a dramatic and compelling conclusion, as mother and daughter draw ever nearer. Amandine is a sumptuous tale of identity and survival, persistent hope and unexpected love.

A Novel

Amandine

The true story of the Umbrian Supper Club, four country women who gather in an old stone house in the hills above Italy's Orvieto to cook, eat, drink and talk. Each woman's passions, disappointments and hopes are artfully recounted in this earthy celebration of life's 'small delights'.

Marlena de Blasi

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