"Tuscany by Book"

Last summer, some good friends from Lincoln took a great month-long vacation in Tuscany. They rented a small farmhouse and shared the house with another couple from Nebraska.

From Florence, where they had arrived by air, they rented a car and drove to their vacation rental. They found the farmhouse late in the evening. As their travel agent had explained, there would be a couple bottles of wine, a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese awaiting them, along with several liters of distilled water. The following morning they drove to the nearby village and bought their groceries for the next few days. All four took turns cooking the meals from the local produce. Each couple had brought a variety of English-language Italian cookbooks.

When not preparing and enjoying their meals, their days were occupied by reading about Italy, walking in the countryside, visiting the small towns by auto in a fifty-mile radius, and taking several train trips to Florence to see art galleries and other points of historical interest.

A reader can practically take the same sort of vacation by reading any one of a number of books at the library about Tuscany.

In “Bella Tuscany: the Sweet Life in Italy”, the author, Frances Mayes, continues where she left off with her bestseller non-fiction book, “Under the Tuscan Sun”. In this book, she and her husband, Ed, return to their beloved villa in the small hillside town of Cortona. They had purchased the house ten years earlier and were slowly renovating it. As expected, the most recent repair project--- that had been promised by their contractor to be completed before their arrival-- hadn’t been started.

Between working with the local laborers on their house and rejuvenating their gardens, Frances and her husband traveled the countryside in search of “the Sweet Life in Italy”. They picked wild asparagus, visited the fish markets in the coastal villages and searched out the local varieties of buffalo mozzarella. They enjoyed several six-hour communal feasts where a half-dozen families cook heaping platters of pasta covered with all sorts of exotic sauces and served with roasted lamb and fish. When the meals were finished and the wine drunk, they joined the locals in dancing to the music provided by the village accordion player. In “Bella Tuscany”, Mayes captures the details of the commonplace that so very much enriches the lives of those who live in Tuscany—“la dolce vita”.

A newer fiction book, which features Tuscany as the locale, is “Breathing Room” by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. With her public reputation in ruin, her husband living with another woman, and her bank accounts depleted, Dr. Isabel Favor, a self-help diva, known to millions of television viewers, decides to chuck it all and spend the summer by herself in a farmhouse in Tuscany. Her intention is to spend a quiet time writing a new book to help get her career jumpstarted.

On her first night in Florence, Isabel gets inebriated at a café and picks up an Italian gigolo. The next day, still in a state of chagrin over her night with a strange man, she arrives at her farmhouse only to learn that there is no running water. When she returns to Florence to confront the owner of the farmhouse, she learns that the owner is the gigolo of the previous night.

Rather than find the much needed, “Breathing Room”, to reorder her life, chaos reigns for Isabel as romance blossoms between her and her one-night fling who turns out to be a famous European movie star who, coincidentally, is also looking for some “Breathing Room”. Other books by Susan Elizabeth Phillips include, “This Heart of Mine”, “Ain’t She Sweet”, “First Lady”, “Dream, a Little Dream”, “Fancy Pants”, and “Just Imagine”.

The Library Foundation is in need of more books—particularly fiction—for its annual book sale which begins at 6:00 PM on Thursday evening, August 11th. Currently, the fiction shelves in the book sale room are pretty bare. We could also use a lot more paperback novels. This is a great opportunity for you to weed your bookcases. You can then refill in the empty spaces by visiting our book sale which runs through, Tuesday, August 16th.