Recently, Frances and Ed published The Tuscan Sun Cookbook: Recipes from My Italian Kitchen, a collection of their favorite Tuscan recipes. All five highly personal books are about taking chances, living in Italy, loving and renovating an old Italian villa, the pleasures of food, wine, gardens, and the “voluptuousness of Italian life.” The books are translated into more than forty languages.

She has published two photo-texts, In Tuscany, a collaborative photo-textbook with her husband, the poet Edward Mayes and photographer Bob Krist, and Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style from the Heart of Italy, another collaborative book with Edward Mayes and photographer Steven Rothfeld. The other international best sellers are: Bella Tuscany, and Every Day in Tuscany, the last in her Tuscan trilogy. The bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun, remained on The New York Times bestseller list for two and a half years. Out of that instant infatuation have come three marvelous, and hugely popular, memoirs.

The book is populated with a cast of intrinsically southern characters-fatalistic, ribald, eccentric, and big-hearted.įrances has always adored houses, and when she saw Bramasole, a neglected, 200-year old Tuscan farmhouse nestled in five overgrown acres, it was love at first sight. It’s an ode to the South as an intense and (then) isolated place and to the people who lived their passionate lives there. The story begins and ends in the present, with the middle of the book devoted to life in the deepest South in a small town. Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir, published in April, 2014 by Crown, is Frances Mayes’s coming-of-age in Georgia memoir.

Bella tuscany by frances mayes