Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio CD]

I was so excited when I ordered this book and so let down after getting it and looking it over. The cover is VERY deceptive. This is NOT a style/decorating book. This is the story of a couple renovating a wonderful old home in Tuscany. It is well written and at times charming and warm. It is also often quite boring reading about what stone to pick for the house and who they visited and what wine they drank. It almost seems as if the author were forcing another book out for publication!! There are VERY FEW photos...barely any really in the book. The photos present are of wine, friends, a few of the house and a few of home decor/furniture layout, and food. The photos are very striking and pretty....if you enjoy seeing their friends and not really getting any basic decorating ideas. There are about 30 recipes and photos of the food, as I said above. Some recipes are nice but I really didn't see anything new and inspiring. A good Italian cookbook would be a better investment. As for the cover....it is very deceptive to say the least since it focuses on a very pretty vignette: furniture, art, pottery and style of arrangement. This is most definitely NOT what this book is about. In fact: I found the cover to be the best part of the book. I decided to return it and look for a better book really focusing on design. The author clearly loves Tuscany and if you want a nicely written and warm hearted book to read about hers and her husband's story of renovation, friends and their love of food, wine and Tuscany then you will like this book. It is not a picture book at all but rather a reading book with a story that seems rather forced and often VERY VERY boring and drawn out for the purpose of publication.

very disappointing publication-suggest you save your money and check it out of the library before making a decision-the front cover was deceptive in its allure to those looking for a creative nudge in decorating tuscany style. but the most chilling part of this book,for me, was a revealing paragraph at the top of page 106 'quote' Given that the farmers probably will not be returning.I begin to plot new purposes for the hundreds of borghi in the italian hills: music camps,artists' colonies,hospices, religious retreat centers. After all,easily taking the past into the future is part or the italian genius for living.'unquote'... well, there goes he neighborhood! i'm just thankful i got to see Tuscany before the Mayes' makeover of the whole region --some people just can't leave rustic charm alone!!...norma

`Bringing Tuscany Home' by Frances Mayes has several different faces, but it's title tells it's primary objective, which is importing to one's American home the furniture, style, feel, and `Zeitgeist' of Tuscany, where the authors Mayes have a `summer' home. For readers who are familiar with my concentration on culinary works, I was lead to buy this book for review by Amazon's bringing it up in a list of culinary titles, so I bought it largely on the strength of Ms. Mayes' reputation as the author of `Under the Tuscan Sun'. While the book does contain a few recipes, the most interesting one being an Italian plum tart borrowed from Tuscan summer neighbor Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery fame, it is not really a culinary title. Edward Mayes appears to be the cook of the family and most recipes are attributed to him, including a soffrito, a tomato sauce, oven roasted tomatoes, artichoke pesto, olive salsa, Tuscan beans, grilled radicchio, farro salad, fried zucchini flowers, shrimp in pasta shells, pici with fresh fava beans, potato gnocchi and sauce, pasta with pancetta, black cabbage soup, vegetable soup, eggplant parmesan, chicken with olives, rolled veal scallops, rolled sole, white peaches with almonds, and tulip shells with berries. Aside from the very last recipe, everything is pretty standard stuff.

The basis of the Mayes' expertise in Tuscan style is their ownership and renovation of a middle-sized villa just outside the village of Cortona in Tuscany for the last fourteen (14) years and their furnishing a Marin County, California home after the Tuscan style. This, more than anything else, is the meaning of the title. If this book were written by a journeyman travel writer and if it were priced above its very modest $29.95, this volume would be on a very short trip to the discount piles near the cash registers at Borders and Barnes & Noble. But, the authors are not ordinary writers. Their `day job' is being successful poets. Travel non-fiction and even novel writing appears to be more of a sidelight to their business of writing poetry. And, based on the rather grand appearance of their two homes and their antique Italian furnishings, poetry must be paying pretty well, as a supplement to income from Frances' best-selling novel and movie adaptation.

The modest list price is especially surprising when you see the quality of the photography, not only in the technical skill, but also in the careful choice of subjects and the simple consideration of providing a caption to all photographs. The captions are especially important in being able to distinguish scenes from their Tuscan house, `Bramasole' from shots of their new Marin County home which has been decorated to appear as if it were furnished by the Medici's.

One can wonder when they have time to write poetry, as their story is that their Tuscan house was at death's door when it was bought with sagging floors and numerous colonies of mice in residence. But, the house probably more than paid its keep by serving as material for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction works, some of which, as already mentioned, have been very rewarding. And, behind all the renaissance antiques and really grand decorative wall paintings, one can see very modern electrical wall switches and the latest in vinyl baseboards above the ancient Italian tiles on the floor.

The modest price is also surprising given the quality of the text. While the best reason to buy this book may be to embark on an interior-decorating project aimed at emulating Italian decorative style; the real value of the book is for the reader. How many travel writers make references to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology which is best known as the theoretical underpinning of Existentialism, even though it is primarily a doctrine of epistemology, which is a study of what we can know. And, the Mayes are expert at crafting words to bring the experience of both ancient and modern Tuscany about as close to us as possible without an airline ticket to Florence. I even found a little error in medieval sociology interesting as Ms. Mayes was speculating on the closeness of houses in the Tuscan villages, speculating that the Italians rejoiced in simply being close to one another. My college history professor had a much more probable explanation in stating that this was done to conserve arable land for farming, where every square food of soil was valuable for the food it could produce.

I was pleased to discover that while Ms. Mayes is involved in a business partnership with an American furniture company in cooperation to design a line of Tuscan inspired products, there is but one small reference to this arrangement and no evidence of any commercial inducements benefiting this relationship anywhere else in the book. This is not to say there are no commercial references at all. The appendices to the book contain references to numerous Tuscan sources for wine, antiques, furniture, sculpture, scagliola (a form of mosaic using shards of gypsum ground and embedded into stone tabletops, bound, and waxed), ceramics, prints and frames, terra cotta, textiles, crystal, and tableware. True to the title of the book, all sources are of merchants or workshops in Italy. For a brief moment, I thought it would have been better to cite American sources, but then, these are easy to find for yourself in this time of the Internet.

One product for which an American source may have been nice is the Mayes' own olive oil, produced from the 500 some trees on their Tuscan property. They do give a web site for the product, so I imagine that will give sources. For the traveler, the appendices end with a selection of Tuscan hotels and eateries recommended by the authors.

This is a distinctly better than average `lifestyle' book and a worthy companion to Elizabeth Romer's `The Tuscan Year'. Highly recommended for price and words!

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