you
I wanted to go back into the misty past
to begin our conversation because it’s
awfully you and I actually met in the
early 1980s when I moved to San
Francisco and you were a poet and a
teacher and a pre Tuscany poet and I
wanted to ask you because at that time
you’re already a very accomplished
writer and a very accomplished teacher
but obviously your life changed
somewhere along the way and I wanted to
begin by asking how how Tuscany entered
your life and then how under the Tuscan
Sun entered your life I studied
Renaissance art and Renaissance
architecture in college and the minute I
got out of college I wanted to go to
Italy to see all these places I had
studied so that’s what led me there
initially but the minute I got there I
just absolutely fell for the place and
started going back there as often as I
could I remember being in Bologna the
first morning in Italy and it’s that
wonderful city with all those beautiful
arcades and there were people having
coffee and laughing and moving around
talking to each other and I looked at my
husband and said these people are having
more fun than we are and that was kind
of first realization that Italy has a
kind of vivacity that just drew me very
strongly and I started going there
whenever I could I was writing poetry
forever I that was all I ever intended
to write as as I was growing up and
studying in college and I became a
teacher at San Francisco State
University and wrote poetry my husband’s
a poet we breathed poetry but when I got
to Italy in that house after we bought
the house I started writing longer
and lines didn’t anymore want to be cut
at where the line break goes in a poem
and started keeping notebooks and it
just started expanding and I found
myself writing prose I never intended to
and I think it’s just mysterious that
sometimes the rhythms in your brain
change and your genre kind of follows
after that so it wasn’t a conscious
choice but I did start writing prose
because I was writing just out of
excitement at living there and learning
a new language meeting people and it was
very spontaneous and in fact all my
books about Italy have been just written
out of spontaneity and fun did the book
come together fairly spontaneously then
as as a book and you had a manuscript
and you sent it off yes it did it was
very spontaneous and I kind of got it
all together and I sent it off to an
editor at Chronicle Books in San
Francisco and much to my surprise they
accepted it and it was published they
expected it to sell kind of like my
books of poetry had which was not at all
and um it was one of those books that
had just you know took off on its own
legs and surprised everyone I’ve been
kind of following after it ever since
when it did start to sell the editor
called me and he said Frances um this
book is really selling we think it’s
because of the cover
what a charming remark so once the book
came out and became a runaway sensation
was your life turned upside down
well it certainly changed a lot I had
been teaching for 23 years and had been
kind of squeezing my writing in around
the edges mostly doing my writing in the
summer and I was chair of the creative
writing department at San Francisco
State we had 35 writers on our creative
writing faculty it’s very large program
and it was definitely one of those
herding cats
jobs so um it was great to me when I
could I quit not to put too fine a point
on it but I really love teaching but I’m
to be able to be a full-time writer was
such a gift and it took a long time but
I just loved having the fun of deciding
on a project and knowing that I have the
time to actually do it and you’ve been
involved with Tuscany now for for how
long would you say a long time we bought
the house in 1990 it seems impossible
well just impossible but last summer we
celebrated our 20th anniversary there
and we had many big parties and many big
roasted pigs and celebrations and it
just seems impossible because Tuscany is
still new to me that is what is so
unpredictable you’d think after 20 years
you know a place and you know the land
like you know the lines in your own palm
and you think you you know it but Italy
is such a remarkable country maybe it’s
because they only unified to put it
loosely they haven’t really defined
a hundred and fifty years ago but
because they had such a long history of
these small papal States and little
kingdoms everything stayed very
individual different dialect different
pasta different artists different
colored stone and it’s still kind of
like that so even if you’ve been there
20 years you can still go 30 miles and
you’re somewhere you’ve never seen
before it’s some little tiny village
that is very intriguing some little hill
town and the south you know the north
the Veneto all these different places
it’s if you had five lifetimes you could
never know Italy what was it about Italy
or Tuscany in particular at the
beginning of your love affair with it
what was it what are the qualities that
come to your mind that just made you
fall in love with it
initially it was the Renaissance I think
I certainly went there for beardo della
francesca and Frangelico and all the
great Tuscan artists senior le is one of
my favorites because he’s a Cortona boy
so I definitely went Tuscany local boy
makes good yes he did went they are
definitely for the art but I’d have to
say we stayed there for the people
because in this small town it’s 2,500
people within the walls the Etruscan
walls of the town it’s an ancient town
oh they’re just 2,500 people but we
found such an intense sense of community
there and I love that feeling of being
very grounded in a place and
experiencing how life takes place around
a Piazza and you go to the Piazza every
day you do your shopping around the
Piazza you have coffee you run into
everyone you want to see in a few that
you don’t
you transact all your business there I
think that’s one reason the Internet has
not really caught on very much in
Tuscany is because they have this life
in the Piazza so they don’t need to
email anyone they’re going to see them
that day and I still love that yeah it’s
in a way kind of nostalgic to me because
I grew up in a small town in South
Georgia and lived in a place that had
that kind of intense sense of community
that town now is almost completely
boarded up because the shopping centers
have killed the downtown so it doesn’t
exist there anymore but it did when I
was growing up there and for me that
I’ve loved a kind of return to that kind
of connection among neighbors yeah how
his Cortona or Tuscany changed in the 20
years that you’ve been there that’s a
good question I thought it would never
change for I’d say the first 15 years we
were there it didn’t change and now it
started to change pretty rapidly but one
thing
Italy now has a lot of immigrants and
they didn’t before it was very
homogeneous society but the Italians
have always been immigrants here
Argentina
Somalia Ethiopia a lot of places they
have emigrated but they’ve never had the
immigrants coming there very much and
they have not taken to it that well so
there’s there’s a lot of tension there
is all over the world I mean London
Paris a lot of places have the same kind
of tension but in a small town you
experience it very directly
anytime something goes wrong a house is
broken into or something it’s immigrant
you know really so that’s change the
Internet of course has changed our lives
there and I think it’s beginning to
change the lives of Italians as well you
no longer have
that sense of real fairness that you
used to have when you made two telephone
calls home one summer because they were
so expensive I mean now you’ve got your
little phone and you call anybody the
news is right there you don’t need the
Herald Tribune anymore well it’s kind of
sad but a lot of the changes are really
good local kids are going to
universities more particularly young
women when we first went there it was
very unusual for a young woman to go on
to college but now it’s much more common
almost no one in town spoke English then
now quite a few people do there’s a kind
of loss of fairness with that as well
but some of the changes are great and
that would definitely include food and
wine the wine explosion in Tuscany has
exactly parallel the time we’ve been
there Huh What a curious coincidence it
used to be when you went in a trattoria
the waiter would say Bianco enero black
or white and the wine was made by Uncle
Anselmo and that was it now there’s just
fabulous Tuscan wine of course and and
there always was some but hardly anyone
drank it because they made their own or
their uncle made their own but now
people are very aware of wine and we
have these kind of esoteric wine dinners
with top Tuscan wine makers and the food
is paired with cheese aged in caves and
lardo Tico anata and there’s just much
more of a sophistication around food I
mean the food has always been fabulous
and rustic and natural and traditional
and it still is but they’re also chefs
coming in maybe from only
five miles away but coming in and you
know adding levels of creativity around
the local ingredients as has happened in
so much of America same thing so that’s
been a great deal of fun to do witness I
think people are much more aware of what
they have they’re aware that it’s great
that the Santana beans are only there
for two weeks and then they’re gone the
asparagus is there in the spring and
then it’s gone we don’t have the
year-round everything the way we have
here and for instance I go into the
fruit a the door and I say to anuncio
Tina are these pears local and she says
no means piace Senora no they’re not
they’re from castor leona del Lago and I
say oh that’s Leone de la go is five
miles away so there’s a lot of that
sense of fun it’s on the local foods and
people are still foragers that whole
tradition of foraging which must go back
to the Neolithic Age or whatever is
still very active our neighbor sets his
alarm clock for midnight and he own
certain phase of the Moon and he goes
out to Roca DPLA this castle outside
town and picks snails off the castle
walls oh and we hunt chestnuts and
mushrooms people look for wild asparagus
all the while feel lettuces there’s
something very wonderful about that
because in a way it connects you to the
land and I think that is one reason the
Tuscans are so at home in time they stay
very connected with the land and that
foraging is just part of it
reading your books food is such an
important part of the experience of
being there and it’s kind of you
celebrate food so wonderfully is there
one meal out of all the meals that
you’ve eaten that just sticks out in
your mind is the most amazing feast and
maybe the first of the eight-hour
dinners
because I wasn’t used to those at that
time I am now but it was a communion not
a communion or first commute yeah first
communion
dinner a friend had for her two boys and
Ed and I were the last ones there they
had passed around maybe thirty antipasti
already there were maybe 150 people
there and then they served two pastas
that they had made and then several
secondi and we thought the meal was kind
of winding down and we saw four men
coming in the back door holding this
tray it was big enough to hold a human
being on it and it was the thigh of a
Val Val de Chiana cow that was so big
they had had it roasted in a hotel oven
in town so then they passed this around
this wonderful roast roasted beef and
potatoes and then first thing I knew ed
was on his feet singing a song he had
never heard of with four other men and
he was feeling really good because two
women had to ask him if he was in film
and I think we were the first people to
leave we staggered out of there about
eight hours later and I remember at
driving off and he says I just hope
we’re around when those two boys get
married
and when I first started having Italians
over
I remember being thrown because they
would often turn up with a couple of
extra guests but then I had the table
set for eight or ten or something like
that and they’d say Oh so-and-so was in
town we brought him and I’d think oh
great I’ve since come to think how
wonderful that is in a way because it
just shows how naturally they entertain
how they think about food and how they
experience the table it’s like put on
another handful of pasta pull up another
chair it doesn’t matter if I Benny and
so now when we go places we sometimes
take an extra guess right but then it’s
kind of fun it’s an example to me of how
food there is really such a good
reflection of the culture I’ve always
thought it’s never cold there sometimes
here in the US food is cold and there
for instance I have never heard food
associated with guilt and I thought that
was really a profound difference because
I always thought the two words sinful
and dessert went together
but there i’ve never heard anyone at the
table say oh i shouldn’t or that looks
fattening you know none of that it’s not
tortured it’s kind of a natural
phenomenon and i think food is an
excellent way to study a culture because
well you know this who’s at the table
how the food get there i’m what are they
talking about other than how people bury
their dead i think what happens at the
table is just such a real way of telling
what the culture is all about yeah has
italy changed you yes i wipe my hands a
lot more than I do
trying to keep my hands still but I know
naturally do I remember first going
there and seeing people step out of the
phone booth because they couldn’t really
a gesture inspect the punker yeah I
think I I mentioned earlier growing up
in a small town in Georgia and I read
all through high school I was really
concentrating on reading all the Great
Southern writers and I think one of the
strongest things I ever got from reading
them was that sense of place being
destiny and place being a shaper of you
you put yourself down someplace and it
starts to change you and I definitely
feel that being Italy in Italy all these
years has changed has changed both of us
I’m kind of a reserved person and I
found myself I’m much much more I’m
extroverted there and I think Edie has
to I think I’m the whole sense of the
open door has influenced us quite a bit
our house there is very at home in the
landscape when I first saw it I thought
if I lived in that house I could be at
home there too there no screens on the
doors are open the windows are open the
butterflies go in one window and out the
other the neighborhood cats run through
the house it’s kind of the house is open
and therefore the mind and that has
influenced me quite a bit I think it’s
opened up my writing quite a bit it gave
me the confidence to try to write a
novel which I had never quite had the
nerve to do because I was so intimidated
by the great southern novelist but
finally after being in Italy and having
had the ease of writing these Tuscan
books I decided to try to write a
southern novel and I it was hard I it
was one of the hardest things I’ve done
in writing but I I did I did write the
novel but I do feel that being in Italy
has been a wonderful place to be a
writer there’s something about living in
beauty the landscape is beautiful art is
taken for granted you grow up bouncing
your ball against the Orvieto Cathedral
and it’s different somehow
beauty is just something that is part of
their breathing history is such a big
part of Italy for you there’s art
there’s people there’s food can you talk
a little bit about the different sense
of history that you get when you’re when
you’re in Italy there’s a different
sense of time I said earlier Tuscans are
at home in town I think it’s because
they have so much time behind them and
they don’t have that kind of sense of
that life is a kind of frantic thing to
master it’s more like time as a river
and you’re in it so I love that sense of
time there I’m down at the bottom of our
hill Hannibal defeated the Romans in 217
BC
and sometimes you go to dinner at
somebody’s house and they’re talking
about Hannibal you know whether he came
from the south or whether he came this
way and whether he had lost his eye by
then and you think Hannibal could walk
in the door they being from the south
I’m used to the War Between the States
being present and your dead grandmother
could walk in the door but Hannibal so
they do have this really long sense of
time and our little town was one of the
12 original etruscan cities so the town
walls are from 800 BC and there’s an
Etruscan wall above our house and then
there’s a Medici wall and then down
below where Hannibal drove the Romans
into Lake Trasimene oh so you you live
in layers of time you conscious of it
because of the landscape and the
landscape is still so similar to the
backgrounds in those Renaissance
paintings that you feel like I there’s a
continuum of time that you’re in so you
feel less eye less crushed by time but
more in it yeah at the same time they’re
very contemporary people they’re not
living in the past in any way but there
they are in those old houses in Cortona
many of them have Renaissance facades
and then you go in them and they’re all
these little medieval rabbit warren type
rooms and they didn’t feel it necessary
to tear those down and build something
else they’re still in them in time I
think if you died in the plague and you
came back to Cortona today you could
still find your house
that’s a great sentence I’m not sure the
tourist brochures have to reposition
that a little bit all of this makes me
think about your relationship with
bramasole too and just how it’s a
character it’s a human a living
breathing presence in your life can you
talk a little bit I mentioned the house
is very at home in the landscape but
it’s a it’s a house like you dream of
not that it’s a dream house in terms of
amenities because it’s not but it’s got
this smeary apricot rose gold facade and
it looks out over valley and it just
looks like a house in a dream so I think
it’s Bachelard who says the house should
protect the dreamer and we feel
protected as dreamers in the house
however five years ago we weren’t
protected enough that we didn’t do
something incredibly crazy which was to
buy another house in the mountains
outside Cortona we were out picking
blackberries one day and we saw this
little stone cottage in the distance and
we thought it was like Little Red Riding
Hood’s house or something and we
scrambled over the nettles and
blackberries to it and first thing we
know we had bought it first thing we did
restore the house and now we are crazy
enough to have two houses in the same
place eventually we’ll have to sell it
but we can’t bear to right now right you
fell in love with another house we did
it was also that we fell in love with
another aspect of Tuscany because this
is in the mountains and the mountain
people are independent they’re fierce
and you definitely out there don’t get
the sense that you’re in Renaissance
Tuscany not you know it’s not really
Tuscany as we knew it it’s kind of an
older biotic pool of the land
we’ve met some really amazing characters
out in the hills and it’s been such an
expansion of our knowledge of what the
place is like and in the restoration we
found two pieces of a Roman aqueduct and
there’s a ruling of a medieval monastery
out in the forest it’s a chestnut forest
and so it’s this really ancient
connection there’s an Etruscan spring
the stones are broken down but our house
was built by the followers of Saint
Francis of Assisi so it’s been there for
eight hundred years and it’s a really an
amazing place it kind of exudes peace
and I think it’s from those followers
who lived in caves on that mountainside
as they followed Saint Francis in his
travels he spent a winter in Cortona at
a monastery called hla
and his followers built three or four
houses and that’s one of them that’s
partly why it’s so hard to let it go
because it’s such a piece of the
patrimony and it was abandoned forever I
was just about to abandon do you ever
feel like Alice in Wonderland
you just sort of plopped through a
rabbit hole and landed in Tuscany and
your life was changed like that in a way
I do but I also feel like I’m I kind of
made my luck well you know I feel like
I’m everybody told me it was crazy thing
to do and you shouldn’t do that anytime
anybody ever said should to me that was
bad things say because I start thinking
about why I should when they say
shouldn’t I start thinking about why I
should but um it was a lot of work – you
know restoring the houses and it was a
risk so I don’t feel like it just kind
of miraculously happened to me I feel
like I kind of
I made it happen yeah it which brings up
one of the things I love about your
writing is it’s so beautiful and on a
certain level you read it and you think
what a parody sickle life you have you
get up in the morning and you pick
something in the garden and that becomes
your meal and but you also talk about
you know death and hardship and
deprivation and challenges you you don’t
at all shirk talking about the really
the difficult parts of life there too
was was that ever a challenge for you to
confront the tough things as well as the
beautiful things I wrote poetry for so
many years and I I think when I look
back at a lot of my poetry it was quite
dark and I think something about being
in Italy in a way turned me more towards
a light do you ever feel the weight of
under the Tuscan Sun on your shoulders
so that when you set out to write
something new you’re afraid it’s going
to be measured against that phenomenal
success and does that have any kind of a
affect on you I think when a some a book
like that happens you can’t expect it to
happen again you know you stand out in
the field your whole life and lightning
strikes you once and that’s that’s kind
of the way I think about it I think of
my writing projects as wonderful places
out in front of me that I can explore
what I’m interested in right then and I
don’t really mind what happens to the
books I feel incredibly lucky that my
books have you know found their way in
the world but it’s not really why I
write and I think almost any writer
would you agree once you face the blank
page it’s like you’ve never really
written anything before so I’m I don’t
really expect another under the Tuscan
Sun but I’m I’ve had such great luck
writing in Italy
Italy’s given me seven books so that’s
that’s great
you
I wanted to go back into the misty past
to begin our conversation because it’s
awfully you and I actually met in the
early 1980s when I moved to San
Francisco and you were a poet and a
teacher and a pre Tuscany poet and I
wanted to ask you because at that time
you’re already a very accomplished
writer and a very accomplished teacher
but obviously your life changed
somewhere along the way and I wanted to
begin by asking how how Tuscany entered
your life and then how under the Tuscan
Sun entered your life I studied
Renaissance art and Renaissance
architecture in college and the minute I
got out of college I wanted to go to
Italy to see all these places I had
studied so that’s what led me there
initially but the minute I got there I
just absolutely fell for the place and
started going back there as often as I
could I remember being in Bologna the
first morning in Italy and it’s that
wonderful city with all those beautiful
arcades and there were people having
coffee and laughing and moving around
talking to each other and I looked at my
husband and said these people are having
more fun than we are and that was kind
of first realization that Italy has a
kind of vivacity that just drew me very
strongly and I started going there
whenever I could I was writing poetry
forever I that was all I ever intended
to write as as I was growing up and
studying in college and I became a
teacher at San Francisco State
University and wrote poetry my husband’s
a poet we breathed poetry but when I got
to Italy in that house after we bought
the house I started writing longer
and lines didn’t anymore want to be cut
at where the line break goes in a poem
and started keeping notebooks and it
just started expanding and I found
myself writing prose I never intended to
and I think it’s just mysterious that
sometimes the rhythms in your brain
change and your genre kind of follows
after that so it wasn’t a conscious
choice but I did start writing prose
because I was writing just out of
excitement at living there and learning
a new language meeting people and it was
very spontaneous and in fact all my
books about Italy have been just written
out of spontaneity and fun did the book
come together fairly spontaneously then
as as a book and you had a manuscript
and you sent it off yes it did it was
very spontaneous and I kind of got it
all together and I sent it off to an
editor at Chronicle Books in San
Francisco and much to my surprise they
accepted it and it was published they
expected it to sell kind of like my
books of poetry had which was not at all
and um it was one of those books that
had just you know took off on its own
legs and surprised everyone I’ve been
kind of following after it ever since
when it did start to sell the editor
called me and he said Frances um this
book is really selling we think it’s
because of the cover
what a charming remark so once the book
came out and became a runaway sensation
was your life turned upside down
well it certainly changed a lot I had
been teaching for 23 years and had been
kind of squeezing my writing in around
the edges mostly doing my writing in the
summer and I was chair of the creative
writing department at San Francisco
State we had 35 writers on our creative
writing faculty it’s very large program
and it was definitely one of those
herding cats
jobs so um it was great to me when I
could I quit not to put too fine a point
on it but I really love teaching but I’m
to be able to be a full-time writer was
such a gift and it took a long time but
I just loved having the fun of deciding
on a project and knowing that I have the
time to actually do it and you’ve been
involved with Tuscany now for for how
long would you say a long time we bought
the house in 1990 it seems impossible
well just impossible but last summer we
celebrated our 20th anniversary there
and we had many big parties and many big
roasted pigs and celebrations and it
just seems impossible because Tuscany is
still new to me that is what is so
unpredictable you’d think after 20 years
you know a place and you know the land
like you know the lines in your own palm
and you think you you know it but Italy
is such a remarkable country maybe it’s
because they only unified to put it
loosely they haven’t really defined
a hundred and fifty years ago but
because they had such a long history of
these small papal States and little
kingdoms everything stayed very
individual different dialect different
pasta different artists different
colored stone and it’s still kind of
like that so even if you’ve been there
20 years you can still go 30 miles and
you’re somewhere you’ve never seen
before it’s some little tiny village
that is very intriguing some little hill
town and the south you know the north
the Veneto all these different places
it’s if you had five lifetimes you could
never know Italy what was it about Italy
or Tuscany in particular at the
beginning of your love affair with it
what was it what are the qualities that
come to your mind that just made you
fall in love with it
initially it was the Renaissance I think
I certainly went there for beardo della
francesca and Frangelico and all the
great Tuscan artists senior le is one of
my favorites because he’s a Cortona boy
so I definitely went Tuscany local boy
makes good yes he did went they are
definitely for the art but I’d have to
say we stayed there for the people
because in this small town it’s 2,500
people within the walls the Etruscan
walls of the town it’s an ancient town
oh they’re just 2,500 people but we
found such an intense sense of community
there and I love that feeling of being
very grounded in a place and
experiencing how life takes place around
a Piazza and you go to the Piazza every
day you do your shopping around the
Piazza you have coffee you run into
everyone you want to see in a few that
you don’t
you transact all your business there I
think that’s one reason the Internet has
not really caught on very much in
Tuscany is because they have this life
in the Piazza so they don’t need to
email anyone they’re going to see them
that day and I still love that yeah it’s
in a way kind of nostalgic to me because
I grew up in a small town in South
Georgia and lived in a place that had
that kind of intense sense of community
that town now is almost completely
boarded up because the shopping centers
have killed the downtown so it doesn’t
exist there anymore but it did when I
was growing up there and for me that
I’ve loved a kind of return to that kind
of connection among neighbors yeah how
his Cortona or Tuscany changed in the 20
years that you’ve been there that’s a
good question I thought it would never
change for I’d say the first 15 years we
were there it didn’t change and now it
started to change pretty rapidly but one
thing
Italy now has a lot of immigrants and
they didn’t before it was very
homogeneous society but the Italians
have always been immigrants here
Argentina
Somalia Ethiopia a lot of places they
have emigrated but they’ve never had the
immigrants coming there very much and
they have not taken to it that well so
there’s there’s a lot of tension there
is all over the world I mean London
Paris a lot of places have the same kind
of tension but in a small town you
experience it very directly
anytime something goes wrong a house is
broken into or something it’s immigrant
you know really so that’s change the
Internet of course has changed our lives
there and I think it’s beginning to
change the lives of Italians as well you
no longer have
that sense of real fairness that you
used to have when you made two telephone
calls home one summer because they were
so expensive I mean now you’ve got your
little phone and you call anybody the
news is right there you don’t need the
Herald Tribune anymore well it’s kind of
sad but a lot of the changes are really
good local kids are going to
universities more particularly young
women when we first went there it was
very unusual for a young woman to go on
to college but now it’s much more common
almost no one in town spoke English then
now quite a few people do there’s a kind
of loss of fairness with that as well
but some of the changes are great and
that would definitely include food and
wine the wine explosion in Tuscany has
exactly parallel the time we’ve been
there Huh What a curious coincidence it
used to be when you went in a trattoria
the waiter would say Bianco enero black
or white and the wine was made by Uncle
Anselmo and that was it now there’s just
fabulous Tuscan wine of course and and
there always was some but hardly anyone
drank it because they made their own or
their uncle made their own but now
people are very aware of wine and we
have these kind of esoteric wine dinners
with top Tuscan wine makers and the food
is paired with cheese aged in caves and
lardo Tico anata and there’s just much
more of a sophistication around food I
mean the food has always been fabulous
and rustic and natural and traditional
and it still is but they’re also chefs
coming in maybe from only
five miles away but coming in and you
know adding levels of creativity around
the local ingredients as has happened in
so much of America same thing so that’s
been a great deal of fun to do witness I
think people are much more aware of what
they have they’re aware that it’s great
that the Santana beans are only there
for two weeks and then they’re gone the
asparagus is there in the spring and
then it’s gone we don’t have the
year-round everything the way we have
here and for instance I go into the
fruit a the door and I say to anuncio
Tina are these pears local and she says
no means piace Senora no they’re not
they’re from castor leona del Lago and I
say oh that’s Leone de la go is five
miles away so there’s a lot of that
sense of fun it’s on the local foods and
people are still foragers that whole
tradition of foraging which must go back
to the Neolithic Age or whatever is
still very active our neighbor sets his
alarm clock for midnight and he own
certain phase of the Moon and he goes
out to Roca DPLA this castle outside
town and picks snails off the castle
walls oh and we hunt chestnuts and
mushrooms people look for wild asparagus
all the while feel lettuces there’s
something very wonderful about that
because in a way it connects you to the
land and I think that is one reason the
Tuscans are so at home in time they stay
very connected with the land and that
foraging is just part of it
reading your books food is such an
important part of the experience of
being there and it’s kind of you
celebrate food so wonderfully is there
one meal out of all the meals that
you’ve eaten that just sticks out in
your mind is the most amazing feast and
maybe the first of the eight-hour
dinners
because I wasn’t used to those at that
time I am now but it was a communion not
a communion or first commute yeah first
communion
dinner a friend had for her two boys and
Ed and I were the last ones there they
had passed around maybe thirty antipasti
already there were maybe 150 people
there and then they served two pastas
that they had made and then several
secondi and we thought the meal was kind
of winding down and we saw four men
coming in the back door holding this
tray it was big enough to hold a human
being on it and it was the thigh of a
Val Val de Chiana cow that was so big
they had had it roasted in a hotel oven
in town so then they passed this around
this wonderful roast roasted beef and
potatoes and then first thing I knew ed
was on his feet singing a song he had
never heard of with four other men and
he was feeling really good because two
women had to ask him if he was in film
and I think we were the first people to
leave we staggered out of there about
eight hours later and I remember at
driving off and he says I just hope
we’re around when those two boys get
married
and when I first started having Italians
over
I remember being thrown because they
would often turn up with a couple of
extra guests but then I had the table
set for eight or ten or something like
that and they’d say Oh so-and-so was in
town we brought him and I’d think oh
great I’ve since come to think how
wonderful that is in a way because it
just shows how naturally they entertain
how they think about food and how they
experience the table it’s like put on
another handful of pasta pull up another
chair it doesn’t matter if I Benny and
so now when we go places we sometimes
take an extra guess right but then it’s
kind of fun it’s an example to me of how
food there is really such a good
reflection of the culture I’ve always
thought it’s never cold there sometimes
here in the US food is cold and there
for instance I have never heard food
associated with guilt and I thought that
was really a profound difference because
I always thought the two words sinful
and dessert went together
but there i’ve never heard anyone at the
table say oh i shouldn’t or that looks
fattening you know none of that it’s not
tortured it’s kind of a natural
phenomenon and i think food is an
excellent way to study a culture because
well you know this who’s at the table
how the food get there i’m what are they
talking about other than how people bury
their dead i think what happens at the
table is just such a real way of telling
what the culture is all about yeah has
italy changed you yes i wipe my hands a
lot more than I do
trying to keep my hands still but I know
naturally do I remember first going
there and seeing people step out of the
phone booth because they couldn’t really
a gesture inspect the punker yeah I
think I I mentioned earlier growing up
in a small town in Georgia and I read
all through high school I was really
concentrating on reading all the Great
Southern writers and I think one of the
strongest things I ever got from reading
them was that sense of place being
destiny and place being a shaper of you
you put yourself down someplace and it
starts to change you and I definitely
feel that being Italy in Italy all these
years has changed has changed both of us
I’m kind of a reserved person and I
found myself I’m much much more I’m
extroverted there and I think Edie has
to I think I’m the whole sense of the
open door has influenced us quite a bit
our house there is very at home in the
landscape when I first saw it I thought
if I lived in that house I could be at
home there too there no screens on the
doors are open the windows are open the
butterflies go in one window and out the
other the neighborhood cats run through
the house it’s kind of the house is open
and therefore the mind and that has
influenced me quite a bit I think it’s
opened up my writing quite a bit it gave
me the confidence to try to write a
novel which I had never quite had the
nerve to do because I was so intimidated
by the great southern novelist but
finally after being in Italy and having
had the ease of writing these Tuscan
books I decided to try to write a
southern novel and I it was hard I it
was one of the hardest things I’ve done
in writing but I I did I did write the
novel but I do feel that being in Italy
has been a wonderful place to be a
writer there’s something about living in
beauty the landscape is beautiful art is
taken for granted you grow up bouncing
your ball against the Orvieto Cathedral
and it’s different somehow
beauty is just something that is part of
their breathing history is such a big
part of Italy for you there’s art
there’s people there’s food can you talk
a little bit about the different sense
of history that you get when you’re when
you’re in Italy there’s a different
sense of time I said earlier Tuscans are
at home in town I think it’s because
they have so much time behind them and
they don’t have that kind of sense of
that life is a kind of frantic thing to
master it’s more like time as a river
and you’re in it so I love that sense of
time there I’m down at the bottom of our
hill Hannibal defeated the Romans in 217
BC
and sometimes you go to dinner at
somebody’s house and they’re talking
about Hannibal you know whether he came
from the south or whether he came this
way and whether he had lost his eye by
then and you think Hannibal could walk
in the door they being from the south
I’m used to the War Between the States
being present and your dead grandmother
could walk in the door but Hannibal so
they do have this really long sense of
time and our little town was one of the
12 original etruscan cities so the town
walls are from 800 BC and there’s an
Etruscan wall above our house and then
there’s a Medici wall and then down
below where Hannibal drove the Romans
into Lake Trasimene oh so you you live
in layers of time you conscious of it
because of the landscape and the
landscape is still so similar to the
backgrounds in those Renaissance
paintings that you feel like I there’s a
continuum of time that you’re in so you
feel less eye less crushed by time but
more in it yeah at the same time they’re
very contemporary people they’re not
living in the past in any way but there
they are in those old houses in Cortona
many of them have Renaissance facades
and then you go in them and they’re all
these little medieval rabbit warren type
rooms and they didn’t feel it necessary
to tear those down and build something
else they’re still in them in time I
think if you died in the plague and you
came back to Cortona today you could
still find your house
that’s a great sentence I’m not sure the
tourist brochures have to reposition
that a little bit all of this makes me
think about your relationship with
bramasole too and just how it’s a
character it’s a human a living
breathing presence in your life can you
talk a little bit I mentioned the house
is very at home in the landscape but
it’s a it’s a house like you dream of
not that it’s a dream house in terms of
amenities because it’s not but it’s got
this smeary apricot rose gold facade and
it looks out over valley and it just
looks like a house in a dream so I think
it’s Bachelard who says the house should
protect the dreamer and we feel
protected as dreamers in the house
however five years ago we weren’t
protected enough that we didn’t do
something incredibly crazy which was to
buy another house in the mountains
outside Cortona we were out picking
blackberries one day and we saw this
little stone cottage in the distance and
we thought it was like Little Red Riding
Hood’s house or something and we
scrambled over the nettles and
blackberries to it and first thing we
know we had bought it first thing we did
restore the house and now we are crazy
enough to have two houses in the same
place eventually we’ll have to sell it
but we can’t bear to right now right you
fell in love with another house we did
it was also that we fell in love with
another aspect of Tuscany because this
is in the mountains and the mountain
people are independent they’re fierce
and you definitely out there don’t get
the sense that you’re in Renaissance
Tuscany not you know it’s not really
Tuscany as we knew it it’s kind of an
older biotic pool of the land
we’ve met some really amazing characters
out in the hills and it’s been such an
expansion of our knowledge of what the
place is like and in the restoration we
found two pieces of a Roman aqueduct and
there’s a ruling of a medieval monastery
out in the forest it’s a chestnut forest
and so it’s this really ancient
connection there’s an Etruscan spring
the stones are broken down but our house
was built by the followers of Saint
Francis of Assisi so it’s been there for
eight hundred years and it’s a really an
amazing place it kind of exudes peace
and I think it’s from those followers
who lived in caves on that mountainside
as they followed Saint Francis in his
travels he spent a winter in Cortona at
a monastery called hla
and his followers built three or four
houses and that’s one of them that’s
partly why it’s so hard to let it go
because it’s such a piece of the
patrimony and it was abandoned forever I
was just about to abandon do you ever
feel like Alice in Wonderland
you just sort of plopped through a
rabbit hole and landed in Tuscany and
your life was changed like that in a way
I do but I also feel like I’m I kind of
made my luck well you know I feel like
I’m everybody told me it was crazy thing
to do and you shouldn’t do that anytime
anybody ever said should to me that was
bad things say because I start thinking
about why I should when they say
shouldn’t I start thinking about why I
should but um it was a lot of work – you
know restoring the houses and it was a
risk so I don’t feel like it just kind
of miraculously happened to me I feel
like I kind of
I made it happen yeah it which brings up
one of the things I love about your
writing is it’s so beautiful and on a
certain level you read it and you think
what a parody sickle life you have you
get up in the morning and you pick
something in the garden and that becomes
your meal and but you also talk about
you know death and hardship and
deprivation and challenges you you don’t
at all shirk talking about the really
the difficult parts of life there too
was was that ever a challenge for you to
confront the tough things as well as the
beautiful things I wrote poetry for so
many years and I I think when I look
back at a lot of my poetry it was quite
dark and I think something about being
in Italy in a way turned me more towards
a light do you ever feel the weight of
under the Tuscan Sun on your shoulders
so that when you set out to write
something new you’re afraid it’s going
to be measured against that phenomenal
success and does that have any kind of a
affect on you I think when a some a book
like that happens you can’t expect it to
happen again you know you stand out in
the field your whole life and lightning
strikes you once and that’s that’s kind
of the way I think about it I think of
my writing projects as wonderful places
out in front of me that I can explore
what I’m interested in right then and I
don’t really mind what happens to the
books I feel incredibly lucky that my
books have you know found their way in
the world but it’s not really why I
write and I think almost any writer
would you agree once you face the blank
page it’s like you’ve never really
written anything before so I’m I don’t
really expect another under the Tuscan
Sun but I’m I’ve had such great luck
writing in Italy
Italy’s given me seven books so that’s
that’s great
you
Please follow and like us: