Review of Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy by Frances Mayes

*Under the Tuscan Sun* by Frances Mayes (1997). Published by Crown.

Way before ever writing this blog post, I first came into possession of a copy of Under the Tuscan Sun when I was browsing a Savers many months ago.

That was a really fruitful trip as I ended up getting five different books, as I had hit the limit where if you buy four books, you get one free. I thought the title on this one was very generic and almost didn’t even pick it up at first, but what convinced me was when I happened to see something that mentioned MFK Fisher.

I love food writing and the premise of people writing about national cuisines, so then I actually read the synopsis for this book and ended up purchasing the copy.

It took me a bit before every actually getting into this memoir. I ended up taking it on my beach trip to Siesta Key because I knew I would read it then, and it was the second book I picked up (out of five) that I read through in a single trip to the beach. Under the Tuscan Sun was a fairly quick read for me because the writing is straightforward and there wasn’t too much I needed to think about when I was flipping through the pages.

Onwards with the review!

With her future husband, Frances Mayes takes a leap of faith and moves to Italy to restore a house.

Now, this isn’t information that I figured out originally from reading the book upon on Mayes, but she’s a writer who was employed at a university for a while.

You can gleam from the book that she does teach writing at a university, but it wasn’t fully clear as to what her purpose was there—Ed, who becomes her husband later on and is renovating the house with her, is also a writer. This isn’t necessary to understand Under the Tuscan Sun, but clears some things up along the way for me.

Essentially, this book I tend to summarize as one of those that goes as “vibes.” Frances and Ed decide to take a chance and end up buying a house in Italy, but it needs a ton of work. They both have lives and careers in the states, and at some point Frances has to leave him behind to do her teaching job. A good chunk of the book is about the renovations, bumps, and failures they’re seeing along the way as they do this, as well as interactions with Italians.

They’re Americans in Italy, so there’s also a lot of wonder throughout the book about what is considered foreign to them.

Food plays a pivotal role in the book and Mayes goes into a ton of detail about the role of food in Italy and how fresh it is. There’s the butcher, growing their own olives that are pressed into oil, and figuring out how to grow things in general.

Under the Tuscan is well-written, and while some may say they could tell Mayes was a poet, I honestly wouldn’t be able to figure out when on my read through the book.

I thought it was a standard travel memoir that was well-written, and a step below the work of MFK Fisher—despite the earlier comparison that I found on the back of the book. There wasn’t a lyrical note to the book that I could see threaded inside. It felt pretty standard.

Overall Thoughts

I can see how someone might want to read this in order to prepare for a trip to Italy, or want to immerse themselves in the vibes that Mayes creates throughout the book.

I honestly don’t have a ton to say about this book because I thought it was straightforward and I covered all the ground that it has in the previous section. But something to note is that I didn’t hate it. You have to be in a specific mood to read these kinds of books, and I think I was in that because I was on a beach somewhere in Florida burning to a crisp under an umbrella.

But besides that, I didn’t quit reading it halfway through; I ended up finishing it. And that says something right there!

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