A week from today, my new memoir will be published.  Kicking off the tour, I’ll read at the Regulator Bookstore in Durham.  Once a manuscript is finished, it takes many months for the actual book to appear.  The proofing is, for me, the hard part.  Any mistake in the final book is SO painful. Next comes selecting the cover–a pleasure.  Every Day in Tuscany’s cover is by my friend Al Hurley.  He took the photograph from Cortona’s bell tower and when I saw it, I saw immediately that it IS the end of my book–the image was uncanny for me.  Then there are dozens of little edits and queries.

Finally, a day is set, and now that day is near.  9 March. I’m excited about going on tour, meeting many new friends. I dread the flying. I hope I won’t have delays that put me in a hotel at midnight, facing a dinner out of the minibar.  What to read?  Will I get snowed in, like last time? What to say?  Will someone water the seeds I’ve started while I’m gone?  Will someone call out from the audience, “We used to date at U VA”?  Can I keep up my exercise?

Please click on “Tour.” If I am coming near where you live, I would love to meet you.

This is my third memoir about living in Italy.  As the title suggests, it is very much a book about the particulars and pleasures of every day life.  There are no chases, no drug deals, nothing more torrid than the fire in the bread oven.  There is one horrid scrape with an ugly threat–but otherwise, what I am in love with is rural Tuscany: the friends, daily passions, and celebrations of piazza life.  We’ve had so much fun expanding our vegetable garden and restoring another house from the time of Saint Francis of Assisi.  Although we did mind-bending labor on Bramasole, we did not work on the restoration of  the “new” stone-roofed house, merely oversaw every detail for three years–and combed Tuscany for authentic old materials.  Though I will lay a path or paint a room, I hope my drastic restoration days are over! I wrote one long chapter on Luca Signorelli, local boy, and profound renaissance artist.  He and I have become friends, in spite of him being long dead.  That hasn’t seemed to matter.  I propose a Signorelli Trail to follow, like the Piero della Francesca trail so many travellers take. If you don’t share my adoration of him, the places where his work lives are all sublime.  Everywhere in my book there’s food and wine.  I think, 25 recipes–all guaranteed to be terrific. I only wish the aromas could rise off the page!  Some were given to me by favorite Tuscan chefs. You can’t write about Italy without dwelling intensely on the table!  I had an especially good time introducing Italian food to my little grandson.  There’s an ode to friendship–both to our Italian friends and to the American expats who have taken to Italian life so beautifully.  Underlying all the places and events, my question throughout concerns happiness–what is it, how to hold onto it.

In July, we are celebrating twenty years since we bought our house, Bramasole.  We are planning a sparkle-plenty party, with music, great wine and food, and a gathering of friends who have been close over these years. I’m so happy that this new book coincides with this anniversary.  If you read it, I hope that it’s a reminder of life-in-the-moment, wherever you are.  Tuscany is a state of mind; you can have that state of mind anywhere.

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