Reviews - Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

620 reviews for:

Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

Yes, it is significantly different from the movie, but I loved coming across the little pieces and vignettes that made it into the movie and seeing how they'd been woven into the different story of the film. And yes, Frances Mayes is an extremely privileged woman who has lived an extremely privileged life, growing up in a well-to-do Southern family and later becoming an author, poet, professor, and recipient of a not insubstantial divorce settlement. Yes, I could do with fewer references to her linen dresses and Italian shoes.
But I am, and will always be, a sucker for stories of people making a new life for themselves in a foreign land (Durrells in Corfu, Michael Tucker's Living In a Foreign Language, etc), even when it's just for a few months each year. I adore Italy and loved her descriptions of the land, the food, the people, and even the sheer volume of work needed to get Bramasole in shape and maintained. A nice reality check for those times I'd drift off thinking, "yes, we could do that, too.". Though there is that abandoned village for sale in Spain I've been thinking about...

ellemnope's review against another edition

2.0

This book nearly killed me. She's a good writer in terms of sentence structure and description, but there was a serious lack of plot direction. The story just blah blah blahed along. For the full review: http://erraticprojectjunkie.blogspot.com/2012/12/under-tuscan-sun-by-frances-mayes.html