Do You like book A Thousand Days In Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure (2005)?
This was just about the perfect book for me. I enjoyed this more than her first book, A Thousand Days in Venice which was good. This combined one of my favorite regions in the world with a wonderful exploration of the food and culture of that region. I felt the heat of the sun while she harvested grapes and I could smell the rosemary she loved to add to her cooking fire. I don't know if this book was so perfect for me because I was reading it in from an ideal place (on a deserted beach on a Caribbean Island) or because it is simply a perfect escape book. Whichever it is, I smile and sigh every time I think back on this delightful read.
—Lori
Smack dab in the midst of normal and predictable routine, a gypsy thought will sometimes flit through my mind. What would it be like to pull up stakes, travel to an idyllic vacation spot, and live a carefree life? That is exactly what Marlena De Blasi did. She is a kind of modern day gypsy, an American who traveled to Italy to do research for her cook book and ended up in Venice, fell madly in love and married, then moved to Tuscany to taste and touch and feel its earthy pleasures. This book is part travelogue, part memoir, with a dash of cooking thrown in. It's an ingredient list that somehow just works together and is very successful in allowing the reader to enjoy vicariously the pleasures she describes: the grape harvest, the making of olive oil, baking bread in a brick oven built according to ancient pattern, sharing history and birth and death with the locals. Marlena has a voracious appetite for life and is willing to get her fingernails dirty to experience it. I appreciate her full enjoyment of simple pleasures that revolve around hearth and food and loved ones. She has some deep thoughts, too, that go beyond momentary delight:"Some people are afraid of joy. Terrified that they don't deserve it or that they won't be able to feel it should it ever come to visit. Mostly I think that people are terrified that joy won't stay, won't last."I think this quote is possibly my favorite: "Hell is where nothing is cooking and no one is waiting."Marlena De Blasi lays on the descriptive phrases as heavy as her bright red lipstick. She definitely added color to the cold days of winter during which I was reading her book.
—Poiema
This non-fiction account of Marlena De Blasi's life adventure in Italy is a continuation of her love story that began in A Thousand Days In Venice. I am enjoying her adventures and will also read the next installment of her story but found this book not as cohesive as the first. She is a good writer and her food descriptions make you want to go to the kitchen and snack but I feel the breakdown of the story was more of an editor problem than a writer problem. She continues to express her love for Fernando in a romantic and poetic language. They move to a rented converted stable in a small Tuscan village and they make new friends. She inspires the townspeople to revive shared meals and festive evenings with her enthusiasm for their unique culture. A long-time friend visits and his philosophical conversation about how one lives one's life is included but like her first book, A Thousand Days in Venice, the voices of her two young-adult children are noticably absent. How do you move away from your children and not somehow include them in the perspective of the tale? She mentions that both her children are going to visit in the summer but conveniently ends the story before their scheduled visit. Being a mother of 4 children ages 21 to 37 I cannot imagine making such a significant life-change and not include my interaction with my children. Also, the title implies a three year tale but the book is presented as four seasons of a year. The inconsistencies are not enough to write this series off. I hope the next installment, The Lady in the Palazzo, is a better read.
—Carol
