Sense of play, which we may not have experienced so fully since childhood. This makes us feel at home, or rather returned to a This concept is a big focus of Bella Tuscany. It's the natural connection with art, the natural exposure to beauty on aĭay-to-day basis. Scale of the towns, the robust food, yes, but I've begun to think, too, that Under the Tuscan Sun, I've found out that lots of people feel this way. I thought I was strange to feel this way. You often say how you feel more at home in Italy than anywhere else. Italy is endless five years later, I'm still at the beginning. Powerful landscape and I was just falling under its spell. When I ended that book, I wanted to continue to write about the place-such a When I finished Under the Tuscan Sun I was in the beginning of my life in Italy. The Tuscan Sun, you wrote the first line of Bella Tuscany. You say in your book that when you wrote the last line of Under Interview Frances Mayes discusses Italy and how it differs from the USA, herīooks, and the terror of giving a speech in Italian when she was made an Also a food-and-travel writer, Mayes is the editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2002 and the author of A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveller (2006), narratives of her and her husband's travels in Greece, Turkey, Spain, Morocco and other countries. In addition to her Tuscany memoirs, Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, she has authored the illustrated books In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home Swan, a novel and The Discovery of Poetry, a text for readers. Her works include Climbing Aconcagua (1977), Sunday in Another Country (1977), After Such Pleasures (1979), and Ex Voto (1995). In 1975 she earned her MA from San Francisco State University, where she eventually became Professor of Creative Writing, director of The Poetry Center, and chair of the Department of Creative Writing. with husband Edward Mayes, reflects on all the places she’s lived, from Italy and France to Mexico and the South, and what she requires to call a house a home, from the material to the ephemeral: books, friends, food, and art. Frances Mayes is an American university professor, poet, memoirist, essayist, and novelist.īorn and raised in Fitzgerald, Georgia, Mayes attended Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and obtained her BA from the University of Florida. Mayes, who has homes in Italy and the U.S.

Frances mayes author