From Amazon.co.uk
A whole subset of travel memoirs is now devoted to the theme of restoring old houses in Europe, thanks to Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes. While most authors use the home as a vehicle to examine the surrounding culture, in
In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany, David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell tilt their measure decidedly on the side of home decor. "Nothing tells you more about a people than their houses," they write, as they set out to "construct a past based on [their] own private notions of comfort, upon which [they] could glance with pleasure in some hypothetical future".
While initially daunted at restoring a country house in bureaucracy-plagued Italy, the two dive in with gusto when they find Podere Fiume (River Farm) in Maremma, a little known part of Tuscany. Uninhabited for more than 20 years, the farmhouse's downstairs is composed entirely of animal stalls complete with stone troughs while its two acres are lined with olive and fruit trees as well as a small creek. Leavitt and Mitchell tell of tapping into the Italian tradition of craftsmanship replete with iron-fitters, lamp and lampshade makers, wood carvers and furniture restorers. They design their own couch, reconstruct an 1803 fireplace and commission a copy of an 18th century Venetian bookcase with secret doors for CDs. They even recount the paint colours and fabric designs they considered. Needless to say, the density of detail they devote to their decor will mostly be of interest to those who pour over design magazines such as House and Garden and World of Interiors, as the authors do. Fortunately, they also devote some of their short but precise chapters to humorous and telling bits about Italy--the habits, feuds and "poetry and madness" of Italian bureaucracy--as well as portraits of some of their more interesting neighbours, such as Pepe the iron-fitter and Pina the restaurateur.
Written from the point of view of expatriates who live among but are not of, In Maremma offers an interesting, sometimes overdone and other times right-on-target portrait of a less glamorous (if no less interesting) part of Tuscany than that of Frances Mayes. --Lesley Reed
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Leavitt and Mitchell (co-editors of The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories) relate their first two years restoring and inhabiting a run-down farmhouse in Maremma, the poorest and (to tourists) least-known province of Tuscany. Each short chapter describes a different aspect of their lives there, from the incredible lengths of red tape involved in obtaining a driver's license (a holdover, according to a local restaurateur, from the fascist government's inclination "to make private life as difficult as possible, to discourage independent thinking") to "sheep jams" on the roads, for which local procedure is to drive right into the middle of the herd. The authors find that, in this "most boring of all European countries," "one grows to love boredom." Indeed, the authors can devote eons to decorating and landscaping. But they also "profit... from such old-fashioned... diversions as reading, listening to music, gardening, painting, doing jigsaw puzzles, cooking, playing with the dog." The character sketches generally illustrate the country's leisurely pace, e.g., their architect Domenico, when faced with a problem, suggests that they "study" it ("`Study,' in Italian, is synonymous with `put off'"). Although much of the book, replete with rapturous descriptions of furniture, drapes and paint, might be better suited to Elle D‚cor, the nuanced, sometimes funny depictions of the people of Maremma and the premium placed on quality of life are worthy of authenticity-hungry travelogue readers.
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