Living outside one’s native land tends to turn people into storytellers — they build narratives of tragedy, comedy, and if extraordinarily lucky, fairy tales. The author Frances Mayes, now in her 80s, has by any measure lived all three, but primarily the fairy tale.
Trapped in a loveless marriage, she cashed out and used the equity in her San Francisco abode to make what many told her was a reckless decision — to move to Tuscany, Italy; buy a falling-down house and start an olive-oil business. Her story turned into the bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun (1996), which was made into a popular movie starring Diana Lane (2003). The book stayed on the bestseller list for two and a half years, transformed her into a celebrity, and spawned a fad of Americans moving to Italy and trying to recreate Mayes’ experiences living in “bourgeois luxury and good taste,” as The New Yorker put it.
She remains part tour guide in Italy, particularly Tuscany, and even invites fans and readers into her home, for a price of course. In the past two decades, “no other writer has likely lured more travelers to Italy than Frances Mayes,” the BBC’s Ondine Cohane observed in 2021.
She lives part of the year in North Carolina and part in Italy. She is still going strong, with a new novel, “A Great Marriage,” about casual choices and fateful consequences, coming out in August 2024. (She is scheduled to do a presentation at my neighborhood bookstore.) She has a devoted fan base as the author of more than a dozen books, as well as from her travel-writing articles for newspapers and magazines.
“Under the Tuscan Sun: What writing the book taught me about taking risks. When I look back over the last two decades, it occurs to me: one of the great privileges of the author’s life is that you can make the world your home,” she wrote for The (UK) Guardian in 2016.
The settling-in kind of travel I prefer gives you those heightened times where you are most alive and feel at home. I always have loved the suitcase. In my bedroom, the luggage rack is permanently up. Home is that rented white-washed cottage in Crete where the bougainvillea blossoms blew into the hallway. That crazy stone house above Florence, where bats flew around the bed. That stern of a Turkish gulet where 10 of us slept on cushions under the stars. If not for writing, I would not have the chance to feel at home in the world. Before writing Under the Tuscan Sun, I could not have thought this: maybe home is as small as a suitcase.
The best kind of travel, she told the NC Triangle Independent, or Indyweek.com in 2022, is not just about sightseeing. It’s “because you want to grow. You want something to happen to you, you want to be changed. You want to be changed into something you are.”
For armchair travelers, she produced A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveller (2006); and A Place In the World (2022).
A friend, upon hearing my tales of living abroad for nearly nine years, observed that it must be like having a second life. Mayes expanded on this idea. “Travel is a privilege because it gives you the world you were not given. It allows you to be extant in other versions,” she wrote in her 2022 book.
Some writer said, “My home is my subjects.” What a floating idea of home…
“Traveling became not just travel but a choice of living a new way. I learned to see a place from the inside out rather than as a visitor passing through. Renting houses, apartments, even a boat, turned into a way of asking: What is home here? Who are these people and how has here caused them to be who they are?”
“Astounding—we are unconscious of the vast trip we are on every instant of our lives.”
She told Chelsea Greenwood of Shondaland.com, a Hearst publication, in 2022 that she wrote A Place in the World because
“Where you are becomes who you are. Places shape you. It’s like the gods patting the first people into shape out of mud or something. The place itself is powerful. And some places are more powerful than others. You get in that place, and it starts working on you right away. I have that experience a lot. I always feel called to try to find out why that place is the way it is and what it’s like for the people who live there.”
Mayes, a Southerner, grew up in the village of Fitzgerald, Georgia — a mile square — in the 1950s with a strong sense of place, “where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking.”
She wrote that she was “baptized by the great Southern writers who recognized this truth (that place shapes)…who you are and who you are becoming.” She “expected to be rooted in one spot forever,” yet “as it has turned out I love having the memories of living in many places.”
Drill Deeper:
Frances Mayes Finds Joy in Going Home—Whether to North Carolina or Tuscany. Garden & Gun magazine, June-July 2024.
“In her lovely new book, the best-selling author of Under the Tuscan Sun welcomes readers into both her Southern and Italian estates,” by CJ Lotz Diego, Garden & Gun, August 2022. The article juxtaposes pictures of her two estates — Chatwood Farm in Hillsborough, NC (which she sold during the pandemic) — and Bramasole in Italy. She also discusses “the Southern instinct for place.”
Moving Toward Happiness. Relocating to Italy was a massive risk, with an equally massive reward. By Frances Mayes for the Saturday Evening Post. An excerpt from A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home.
“The waves of happiness I began to experience in Italy, however, came from seeing how easily my neighbors went about their days, and from living close to the seasons in a place of beauty. The rhythms of life assumed a natural pace, not the frenetic one I was used to.”
…Don’t mistake the wound of the world with the world you know and love…Tune out, tune in.
How ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ Changed Frances Mayes, By Katherine LaGrave in Afar, 2020. “For me, writing has always been a great intensification of experience. You get to live the experience and then to recreate it. To write is to be able to double your life.”
In 2019, she published See You in the Piazza, which travel journalist Everett Potter in Forbes described as “a diary of her extended travels in her adopted homeland with her husband. It’s a road trip, a feast of small towns and villages of Italy, with lavish descriptions of meals eaten and wines tasted. In the hands of a lesser writer, it might not have worked so well. With Mayes at the helm, it’s a delightful ramble through parts of Italy that few of us have ever visited.”
Potter interviewed Mayes at her home in NC. He asked why has Italy preserved its culture and history so carefully despite the huge influx of tourists from June through September. He also asked what are the biggest misconceptions of Americans about Italy. See her answers.
She keeps fans up-to-date on her website and on her Instagram page. Numerous interviews are posted on YouTube.