Back in the late 1990s, I read a book that would affect the rest of my life. As I stood in line to pay for the book in Selfridges in London on that fateful summer’s day, the woman standing in front of me oozed with enthusiasm when she saw my choice. “Oh, you will love that book! And there are recipes, too!”
That book was Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes’s tale of falling in love, in love with a country, a landscape and one house in particular. Ms Mayes is a writer, but more specifically, she is a poet. Her portrayal of Italy and her and her husband’s search to find just the right place and just the right house in that place to invest in as their summer Italian bolt-hole has become a modern classic. From then on, Ms Mayes’s writing has almost completely revolved around Italy in general, and Tuscany and their house, Bramasole, in particular.
Her writing has inspired me twofold. Firstly, I became obsessed with the idea of Italy and owning a small slice of it. We did, in fact, go on to buy a house in Le Marche in the early 2000s and experience the joys as well as the frustrations of this decision. Despite setbacks, including the earthquakes of 2016 that damaged our grand and glorious loggia and took down the old barn completely, we haven’t regretted it.
Secondly, Mayes’s books made me want to write, and from that time onwards, I began taking classes, locally and online, to acquire the basic skills needed to fill my writer’s toolbox. One lesson that I’ve learned from Mayes is setting the scene. Her eloquent descriptions of people and place still capture my imagination. In her book See You in the Piazza, she writes, “Place will have its way with you.”
Where have you been that has caught your imagination in such a way that you must write about it? That you could perhaps set as the scene for a story? If your prose turns poetic, all the better.
