They had met and married on perilously short acquaintance, she an American chef and food writer, he a Venetian banker. Now they were taking another audacious leap, unstitching their ties with exquisite Venice to live in a roughly renovated stable in Tuscany. Once again, it was love at first sight. Love for the timeless countryside and the ancient village of San Casciano dei Bagni, for the local vintage and the magnificent cooking, for the Tuscan sky and the friendly church bells. Love especially for old Barlozzo, the village mago, who escorts the newcomers to Tuscany's seasonal festivals;...
They had met and married on perilously short acquaintance, she an American chef and food writer, he a Venetian banker. Now they were taking another au...
Marlena di Blasi seduced readers to fall in love with Venice, then Tuscany, with her popular and critically acclaimed books "A Thousand Days in Venice" and "A Thousand Days in Tuscany." Now she takes readers on a journey into the heart of Orvieto, an ancient city in the less-trodden region of Umbria. Rich with history and a vivid sense of place, her tale is by turns romantic and sensual, joyous and celebratory, as she and her husband search for a home in this city on a hill finding one that turns out to be the former ballroom of a dilapidated sixteenth-century palazzo. Along the way, de Blasi...
Marlena di Blasi seduced readers to fall in love with Venice, then Tuscany, with her popular and critically acclaimed books "A Thousand Days in Venice...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "At villa Donnafugata, long ago is never very far away," writes bestselling author Marlena de Blasi of the magnificent if somewhat ruined castle in the mountains of Sicily that she finds, accidentally, one summer while traveling with her husband, Fernando. There de Blasi is befriended by Tosca, the patroness of the villa, an elegant and beautiful woman-of-a-certain-age who recounts her lifelong love story with the last prince of Sicily descended from the French nobles of Anjou. Sicily is a land of contrasts: grandeur and poverty, beauty and...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "At villa Donnafugata, long ago is never very far away," writes bestselling author Marlena de Blasi of th...
Fernando first sees Marlena across the Piazza San Marco and falls in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice cafe a year later, he knows it is fate. He knows little English; she, a divorced American chef traveling through Italy, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thought she was done with romantic love, incapable of intimacy. Yet within months of their first meeting, she has quit her job, sold her house in St. Louis, kissed her two grown sons good-bye, and moved to Venice to marry "the stranger," as she calls Fernando. This deliciously satisfying memoir is filled with...
Fernando first sees Marlena across the Piazza San Marco and falls in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice cafe a year later, he knows...
