“Those who want to find parts of themselves they didn’t know existed, take risks, have an adventure . . . and discover another culture altogether, with its different rhythms, tastes, smells, and ways of being human—those readers will find in Mayes a kindly, eager, tough-spirited guide.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Mayes is a master at capturing a solid sense of place through her lush, poetic narratives.”
—Orlando Sentinel
“It’s easy to understand why Mayes has become a kind of cult figure for seekers of The Good Life. She not only inspires us to seize the moment, sip the wine, and smell the roses, she also makes us feel it is quite possible to transform our lives, just as she did.”

—Lexington Herald-Leader

“Mayes displays a gift for conveying everyday life through her writing . . . and presents a simpler, less frantic version of how to live one’s life.”
—USA Today

“Frances Mayes is, before all else, a wonderful writer.”—Chicago Tribune

FRANCES MAYES is the author of four books about Tuscany. The now-classic Under the Tuscan Sun–which was a New York Times bestseller for more than two and a half years and became a Touchstone movie starring Diane Lane–was followed by Bella Tuscany and two illustrated books, In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home. Mayes is also the author of the novel, Swan, six books of poetry, most recently Ex Voto, and The Discovery of Poetry. A frequent contributor to food and travel publications, she divides her time between North Carolina and Cortona, Italy. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In this age of adventure travel, the lure of the increasingly exotic holds sway. It's no longer enough for vacationers to take a barge down a French river or browse in an Italian market -- no, one must rappel in Africa, kayak in Nepal. The activities must be rugged, and the locales far from the Western traveler's starting place. Given this, many travel-hounds will eye the mostly European destinations listed in Frances Mayes's table of contents dismissively.

Mayes, author of the best-selling Under the Tuscan Sun plus three more follow-up odes to her adopted home, lives a blessedly split life -- going back and forth between northern California and Cortona, Italy, which provides her Tuscan sunshine. It is from these bases that she and her husband, Ed, venture forth to the places some will find too familiar -- Scotland, the Greek islands, Naples. But paradoxically, it is just this sticking to well-trod ground that is one of the book's strengths. For although much, much, too much has been written of the wonders of Burgundy, the beauties of Capri and the gardens of England, when Mayes is at her best, she proves the point that a good writer, a good traveler, can always come up with new insights.

Yet they are not the insights one would expect from a book with the title A Year in the World, which implies that Mayes actually spent a year out in the world -- traveling, traipsing, exploring. In reality what she did was string together reports on many trips, taken over a five-year period, to form this collection. Perhaps it doesn't really matter whether the trips were taken all at once or sandwiched in and around the minutiae of everyday life. But a year spent unmoored -- from home and errands and work and the ties that bind -- would have yielded a very different sort of book from this. These trips -- house rentals, hotel stays, even a cruise -- represent a series of vacations, instead of the year-long quest that the title promises.

Mayes was a poet and professor before she became a one-woman Tuscan industry. She's well versed in literature and art history, and obviously relishes reading up on the history of any new part of the world she encounters. When her method works well, as in her section on Mantova, Italy, it's enriching; her talk of the painter Mantegna and of Shakespeare (in English, Mantova is Mantua, where Romeo awaits news of Juliet) and of the powerful ruling Gonzaga family adds depth and texture to her narrative. (You find yourself making a mental note to plan a visit to the city and to re-read "Romeo and Juliet" on the way there.) But when it fails, it's just clunky verbiage -- fact after enumerated fact, layered one upon another in endless succession (towers in Istanbul, wildflowers in Greece: the eyes glaze, the attention wanders).

In Mayes's world, the blues are always "intense," the waters always "limpid." But just when you think you can't stand another minute, she saves herself. A chapter on a cruise through the Greek islands starts out unpromisingly with Mayes explaining that this is no romantic sea voyage, but rather an ordinary, all-buffets-all-the-time cruise on which she has been invited as a speaker. Then the section takes off, as she reveals a seldom-seen aspect of her writing: an acerbic wit. Quickly, she sees what she's in for with this style of group travel, so far from her usual Tuscan Sun mode: "This first day off the ship, I see how the trip will be. We may choose one dish from a whole menu, one sip from a great bottle of wine. One monastery, not ten. The sublime Byzantine icon museum, but not the Archaeology Museum. We'll have a glimpse, a taste, a few impressions to memorize, and then we go back on board, flashing our ID cards, and sail on."

Among Mayes's most thought-provoking passages are the ones in which she faces the least Western cultures of her travels: a visit to the city of Fez in Morocco and another cruise (of a very different sort) in a traditional wooden gulet along Turkey's Lycian coast. Her penchant for historical detail and her keen observer's eye stand her in particularly good stead in these less familiar surroundings. She also does well when she draws back the curtain on her emotional life, notably during the chapter on Scotland, in which she ruminates on friendships over the passage of time. The friends with whom she is sharing her house-rental are of long standing, but seen infrequently now. Her life has changed a great deal, perhaps the most of anyone in the group -- she knows that, she makes the effort to bring the old friends together. Her thoughts here are interesting, real, honestly felt -- unlike those in a section on Taormina, Sicily, when she ponders the connection between land and local character. This latter passage ends up feeling overly intellectualized, a falsely inserted gloss.

And unfortunately, the book ends on another false note, in which Mayes, obviously feeling the need to tie things up in a neat bundle, tacks on a sort of afterword, "The Riddle of Home," in which she speculates that she will someday open a restaurant-auberge-trattoria, to be called the Yellow Café, on her home turf. Not the home turf of Cortona, not the home turf of California, but her original hometown in the good old American South, in Georgia. Where, you see, they are in need of a civilizing influence, an appreciation of intense blues and limpid waters.

Reviewed by Anne Glusker
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Blood Oranges
Andalucía

Who cut down the moon's
stem?

(Left us roots
Of water.)
How easy to pluck flowers from
This infinite acacia.

--Federico García Lorca


January, old Janus face looking left at the past year and right toward the new. I'm for the new--no mournful backward glance. Make tracks, I write one night on the steamed kitchen window.

The year began with a break-in at my house while my husband and I were finishing dinner. Ed had just tipped the last of a vino nobile into our glasses. Laughing, we were talking about the turn of the year, with Nina Simone crooning "The Twelfth of Never" to us. We'd cleared the plates, the candles were burning down, and outside the dining room window we saw only our potted lemon trees, swaying snapdragons, and yellow Carolina jasmine, for January in California is a blessed season.

In a flash, everything changed. A man crashed through the living room window, screaming that he wanted to die, then loomed on the middle of the rug, his bundled body in ski jacket, droopy pants, and homeboy hat pulled down around his moony face. Even as I write this, my heart starts to pound.

"Give me a knife," he shouted. "I've never done this before, but I'm doing it now." I thought, not does he have a gun will we die, but he's goofy. Then terror pumped through every vein in my body. This can't be happening! Somehow, we'd stood up. Run. My chair tipped over. He lunged into the dining room. I threw my glass of wine in his face, and as he wiped his eyes, we ran out the back door. "I want to die," he shouted to us as we fled into a street darkened by conscientious neighbors in the middle of the latest corruption-engineered energy crisis. Our house was blazing like the Titanic; lights flared in every window. Our intruder had been drawn to us like a fluttering moth toward the screen door on a soft southern night.

Ed grabbed a phone on the way out and somehow called 911 as he sprinted across the street. We ran to separate neighbors, hoping to find someone at home on Saturday night. Startled new Chinese neighbors brought me in and handed me the telephone, though they must have thought I was mad, while the intruder followed Ed across the street to our neighbors Arlene and Dan. Interrupted in the middle of a dinner party, they pulled Ed in and slammed the door. Then our intruder broke through their door--just as the police drove up.

That was the beginning. The drugged young man was on the street again in a month. I found his sunglasses in a flower bed. Expensive. I threw them in the trash. The year rolled on and doesn't bear thinking about. Suffice to say the words surgery, hospitals, deaths. As the sublime September weather arrived, we all experienced the mind-altering, world-shaking attack on America. Go, bad year. May the stars realign.

Now, Janus, my friend, I am going to Spain for a winter month in Andalucía. Andalucía, land of the orange and the olive tree. Land of passionate poets and flamenco dancers and late-night dinners with guitar music in jasmine-scented gardens.


Ed flew to Italy a week ago because, as always, we have some complicated building project in progress. En route to Spain, he has detoured to Bramasole, our house in Cortona, to see about the drilling of a well for a nine-hundred-year-old house we have bought in the mountains. We want to accomplish a historic restoration on this stone house built by hermit monks who followed Saint Francis of Assisi. When I last talked to him, the dowser had felt his stick bend in exactly the spot where I did not want a well and had drilled down a hundred meters without finding a drop. We are planning to meet in Madrid.

From San Francisco, I board a flight to Paris and am happy to see my seatmate take out a book instead of a computer. No white aura and tap-tapping for the ten-hour flight. She looks as if she could have been one of my colleagues at the university. Is she going to Europe to research a fresco cycle or to join an archaeological team at a Roman villa excavation? I take out my own book, ready to escape into silence for the duration. She smiles and asks, "What are you reading?"

"A biography of Federico García Lorca--getting ready for Spain. What are you reading?"

"Oh, a book on John three thirteen."

"Three thirteen. I don't know that verse. We used to sing 'John three sixteen, John three sixteen' in rounds at Methodist Sunday school."

The flight attendant comes by with champagne and orange juice. "Just water," my seatmate and I say in unison. We begin to talk about travel and books, chatting easily, though I am, at first, waiting for a chance to retreat. We know nothing of each other and will part when the scramble to exit at Charles de Gaulle begins.

She asks a lot of questions. I tell her I am a former university teacher, now a full-time writer. I tell her about living part of the year in Italy, and that Italy has given me several books, written with joy. She probes. Are my books published? Are they popular? And if so, do I know why? What do I try to accomplish with my writing? How do I feel about people's responses to my books? On and on. I tell her that I'm embarking on the first of many travels and that I hope to write a book about my experiences. Why? What will I be looking for? I am drawn into lengthy explanations. I say I'm interested in the idea and fact of home. I'm going to places where I have dreamed of living and will try to settle down in each, read the literature, look at the gardens, shop for what's in season, try to feel at home. I'm talking more openly than usual with a stranger. Is she a psychiatrist?

"And you've never felt God's hand on yours?" She looks quizzically at me.

"No. I've felt lucky, though."

"Maybe you are bringing happiness to people through the will of God. Maybe." She smiles.

She answers my own questions evasively. She is holding something back, even in the basic exchanges, such as whether she is on vacation, that simple opening into conversation. Our little equation is out of balance. Finally, I ask bluntly, "What do you do?"

"I . . . I guess you could say I'm a speaker."

"On what subjects?"

Silence. She is gazing out the window. She is a very still person. "I'm part of a foundation. We try to help in communities with severe problems."

Vague. She sees my questioning look. She frowns. "We're involved in education, and orphanages, and churches."

"Oh, so it's a religious foundation? What religion are you?" I assume she is a Presbyterian or Methodist, a good volunteer for good works, or is involved in Catholic charities.

"I know this is strange, but I have a strong sense about you. I'll just tell you my journey." She then describes the surprise of her conversion, her subsequent adoption of six children from all over the world, her work in Africa and Russia. Her husband, a prominent lawyer, eventually had his own revelation and joins her in her missions. Dinner is served and we talk on.

"You've probably never met anyone like me, anyone who hears the voice of God."

"I think I haven't. You hear the voice of God?" Oh, mamma mia, I think.

"Yes, he's talking to me right now, all the time."
"What does he sound like?" I wonder if she is speaking metaphorically, living out a grand as if.

She laughs. "He's funny sometimes. Sometimes we dance. He's telling me about you, but I don't want you to think I'm a psychic with a neon sign in the window!"

I start to ask sarcastically if he is a good dancer and what kind of dances he leads her in--rhumba? But I don't. As a doubter with strong spiritual interests, I'm tantalized by her big holy spirit visitations. I imagine it feels like a mewling kitten being lifted in the jaws of an enormous mother cat and taken to safety. I'm ready myself but have never felt the slightest inkling that anything out there in the void is the least bit interested in the hairs on my head or the feathers of small sparrows. "If God is talking about me, I'd like to hear what he says because I've never heard from him before tonight." Where's the flight attendant? I'd like a big glass of wine. This is getting surreal. I'm thirty-five thousand feet above terra firma with someone who dances with God.

"Well, I will tell you that He says you have the gift of divine humility. How did you get that? It's so rare."

"Maybe it's a lack of confidence!"

"No, I've seen it in one priest, someone I consulted when I felt the urge to prophesy."

Whoa! Prophesy? "Oh, you're a prophet?" I toss this off casually, as though it were Oh, you're from Memphis.

She looks out the window. Sighs. "I know how it sounds. It's so simple." I see her struggling to explain. "I just wait to speak. I wait for God. Sometimes it's just sounds."

"Glossolalia?" She nods. "I've seen that. My friends and I used to peer in the windows at the holy roller and snake-handling churches way down in South Georgia." I don't say that those people fell to the floor writhing and drooling. That we ran away, scared out of our socks. This woman in her Dana Buchman suit and good haircut seems as sane as the United pilot of this plane.

"Have you ever heard of a Charismatic Prophet? That's my calling. I knew I was going to sit beside someone on this flight who would change my life. I always wanted to write. Now I hear how you do it and it frees me to try. God put me beside you. Someone, he says, with a holy approach to writing."

Now I'm really fascinated. Someone who not only hears the voice of God but speaks in the tongues of ange... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Frances Mayes endeavors to make the listener feel as much at home around the world as she made them feel in Tuscany with her first bestseller, UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. She transports the listener to houses and apartments in Morocco, England, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and Portugal, with some side trips to other parts of her adopted Italy and a cruise to Greece. The trips were taken over a five-year span and include the details expected of Mayes--history, shopping, scenery, and, most importantly, food. However, Mayes's monotone reading lacks the enthusiasm one would expect and shines only when describing the people in her life. Still, the abridgment is well done, making her occasional detailed ramblings about history or descriptions much more bearable. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.