Book Reviews of Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy

The story was not as interesting as Under the Tuscan Sun. Story was slow and like a true sequel.

Made me want to visit Italy.

A sweet book and wants to make you travel to Italy and Tuscany and eat the food and savour the country.

A follow-up to Mayes' book, Under the Tuscan Sun.

Frances Mayes writes a great novel that takes you to Tuscany in Italy with interesting characters, Italian food, and descriptions of wine, farmhouses and plants.

Mayes displays a gift for conveying everyday life through her writing...Perfect for those with the yen but not the means for a second home...Mayes presents a simpler, less frantic version of how to live ones's life.

Much better than the movie of the same name - not even the same story! Tells of the work and challenges when an American couple buys a villa in Tuscany that needs lots of work to make it inhabitable. Will make you want to go to Tuscany. Even has a great recipe for asparagus!

if you've ever thought of living in Italy, if you want to be a 'visitor' in Italy, if you LOVE the idea of a villa - this is the book for you. Buona Fortuna

Fun lite read

Never read Under the Tuscan Sun, but I saw the 2003 movie starring Diane Lane.

From Kirkus Reviews
Yes, la dolce vita, but only for some. In the nearly 40 years since Fellini's film first ushered the expression into our lexicon, said vita has been drained of all its original sardonic content, its biting irony, and its social criticism. This sequel to Mayes's bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun, about her second home and life reborn in Tuscany, doesn't preserve Fellini's spirit either, though her account is inevitably charming. Sometimes, too, a tad annoying. For the author does occasionally come off (along with her husband) as cantankerous or supremely unselfconscious. Not appreciating the cold spring rains in Tuscany, for instance, the lucky pair decides, on a whim, to fly to balmy Palermo; on arriving in a hotel room without a view of that city's justly famous palm trees, gli Americani just march down to the lobby and demand one. Yet we are finally won over by Mayes. Who could fail to affirm this poet's lush descriptions of the rolling Tuscan hills, with their timeless olive trees and patient oxen? Equally beautiful are Mayes's evocations of Italians as sincere and welcoming. She realizes that, despite their fame for sweets, the natives actually enjoy foods with a bitter taste or, as husband Ed remarks, they "seem to have acquired more tastes than many of us." Other factual tidbits include a survey of the etymology of the Sangiovese grape--used for Chianti, Brunello, and Vino Nobile--as deriving from the "blood of love." Lovely, and no small consolation to anyone who's far from Tuscany.

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