Audiobooks by Frances Mayes

Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life

"In this sequel to her New York Times bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, the celebrated 'bard of Tuscany' (New York Times) lyrically chronicles her continuing, two decades-long love affair with Tuscany's people, art, cuisine, and lifestyle. Frances Mayes offers her readers a deeply personal memoir of her present-day life in Tuscany, encompassing both the changes she has experienced since Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany appeared, and sensuous, evocative reflections on the timeless beauty and vivid pleasures of Italian life. Among the themes Mayes explores are how her experience of Tuscany dramatically expanded when she renovated and became a part-time resident of a 13th century house with a stone roof in the mountains above Cortona, how life in the mountains introduced her to a 'wilder' side of Tuscany--and with it a lively engagement with Tuscany's mountain people. Throughout, she reveals the concrete joys of life in her adopted hill town, with particular attention to life in the piazza, the art of Luca Signorelli (Renaissance painter from Cortona), and the pastoral pleasures of feasting from her garden. Moving always toward a deeper engagement, Mayes writes of Tuscan icons that have become for her storehouses of memory, of crucible moments from which bigger ideas emerged, and of the writing life she has enjoyed in the room where Under the Tuscan Sun began. With more on the pleasures of life at Bramasole, the delights and challenges of living in Italy day-to-day and favorite recipes, Every Day in Tuscany is a passionate and inviting account of the richness and complexity of Italian life."

Frances Mayes (Author), Frances Mayes (Narrator)

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Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy

"I always imagine each of the signoras who lived in this house—where she shelled peas, rocked the grandchild, placed a vase of the pink roses. Now I would like to take one of these women back to my house in California to show her how Bramasole traveled to America and took root, how the doors there are open to the breeze from San Pablo bay and to the distant view of Mount Tamalpais, how the table has expanded and the garden has burgeoned… The “bard of Tuscany” (New York Times) now offers a lavishly illustrated book for everyone who dreams of integrating the Tuscan lifestyle—from home decoration and cooking, to eating and drinking, to gardening, socializing, and celebrating—into their own lives. When Frances Mayes fell in love with Tuscany and Bramasole, millions of readers basked in the experience through her three bestselling memoirs. Now Frances and her husband, In Tuscany coauthor Edward, share the essence of Tuscan life as they have lived it, with specific ideas and inspiration for readers stateside to bring the beauty and spirit of Tuscany into their own home decor, meals, gardens, entertaining and, most important, outlook on life. In her inimitable warm and evocative tone, Frances helps readers develop an eye for authentic Tuscan style, with advice on how to: • Choose a Tuscan color palette for the home, from earthy apricot tones to invigorating shades of antique blue. • Personalize a room with fanciful door frames, unique painted furniture, and fresco murals. • Cultivate a Tuscan garden, adding fountains, vine-covered pergolas, and terra-cotta urns among the herbs and flowers • Select the best Italian vino. (Frances describes lunches at regional vineyards and imparts tips for pairing food and wine.) • Create an atmosphere of irresistible, anytime hospitality—a casa aperta (open home). • Make primo finds at local antiques markets. (And to help truly bring Tuscany home, shipping advice and market days for several Tuscan towns are included.) • Set an imaginative Tuscan table using majolica and vintage linens. • Enjoy the abundant flavors and easy simplicity of the Tuscan kitchen, with details on everything from olive oil and vino santo to pici and gnocchi, plus special homegrown menus and recipes. • Make the most of a trip to Tuscany, visiting Frances’s favorite hill towns, restaurants, small museums, and other soothing places. With more than 100 photos by acclaimed photographer Steven Rothfeld (including several of the Mayes’s California home and its Tuscan accents), twenty-five all-new recipes, and lists of resources for travelers and shoppers, Bringing Tuscany Home is a treasure trove of practical advice and memorable images."

Edward Mayes, Frances Mayes (Author), Frances Mayes (Narrator)

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Swan

"By the #1 bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany and In Tuscany, Swan is a haunting novel set in the deep South -- a resonant tale of long-buried family secrets and mysteries brought suddenly to light. In her celebrated memoirs of life in Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes masterfully about people in a powerful and shaping place. In Swan, her first novel, she has created an equally intimate world, rich with striking characters and intriguing twists of fate, that hearkens back to her southern roots. The Masons are a prominent but now fragmented family who have lived for generations in Swan, an edenic, hidebound small town in Georgia. As Swan opens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life as an archeologist in Italy: The body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years before, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited on new terms with her troubled, isolated brother J.J., who has never ventured far from Swan, the Mason children grapple with the profound effects of their mother's life and death on their own lives. When a new explanation for Catherine’s death emerges, and other closely guarded family secrets rise to the surface as well, Ginger and J.J. are confronted with startling truths about their family, a particular ordeal in a family and a town that wants to keep the past buried. Beautifully evoking the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the deep South while telling an utterly compelling story of the complexity of family ties, Swan marks the remarkable fiction debut of one of America’s best-loved writers."

Frances Mayes (Author), Debra Monk (Narrator)

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In Tuscany

"A lavishly illustrated ode to the joys of Tuscany's people, food, landscapes, and art, from the bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun and See You in the Piazza "A love letter to Italy written in precise and passionate language of near-poetic density."-Newsday In Tuscany celebrates the abundant pleasures of life in Italy as it is lived at home, at festivals, feasts, restaurants and markets, in the kitchen and on the piazza, in the vineyards, fields, and olive groves. Combining essays by Frances Mayes and a chapter by her husband, poet Edward Mayes, with more than 200 full-color photos by photographer Bob Krist, each of this book's five sections highlights a signature aspect of Tuscan life: La Piazza: the locus of Italian village life. With photographs of the shop signs, the outdoor markets, medieval streets, people, their pets and their cars, and snippets of conversations overheard, Mayes reveals the life of the Piazza in her town of Cortona as well as out-of-the-way places such as Volterra, Asciano, Monte San Savino, and Castelmuzio. La Festa: the celebration. Essays and photos of feasts and celebrations, such as the Christmas dinner for twenty-seven at a neighbor's house and a donkey race around the church at Montepulciano Stazione, illustrate how the Tuscans celebrate the seasons--their open ways of friendship, their connection to nature, and most of all, their sense of abundance. Il Campo: the field. Here Edward Mayes evokes the deep sense of the shift of seasons as he picks olives before he and Frances head off to the olive oil mill and enjoy the first bruscette with new oil. La Cucina: the kitchen. An intimate view of the all-important role of the kitchen in Tuscan culture, including photographs of her own kitchen and gardens, menus from great local cooks, the elements of the Tuscan table, dishes with cultural and culinary notes on each, and, of course, delectable recipes. La Bellezza: the beauty. From the quality of the light falling on sublime landscapes in different seasons and Tuscan faces in moments of laughter to a silhouette of cypress trees in the early evening and a wild bird perched on a neigbor's head, In Tuscany features views of beauty that reveal the singular splendor of one of the world's best-loved and most artistic regions."

Edward Mayes, Frances Mayes (Author), Edward Mayes, Frances Mayes (Narrator)

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Bella Tuscany

"Frances Mayes, whose enchanting #1 New York Times bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites readers back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food, there and throughout Italy. Having spent her summers in Tuscany for the past several years, Frances Mayes relished the opportunity to experience the pleasures of primavera, an Italian spring. A sabbatical from teaching in San Francisco allowed her to return to Cortona-and her beloved house, Bramasole-just as the first green appeared on the rocky hillsides. Bella Tuscany, a companion volume to Under the Tuscan Sun, is her passionate and lyrical account of her continuing love affair with Italy. Now truly at home there, Mayes writes of her deepening connection to the land, her flourishing friendships with local people, the joys of art, food, and wine, and the rewards and occasional heartbreaks of her villa's ongoing restoration. It is also a memoir of a season of change, and of renewed possibility. As spring becomes summer she revives Bramasole's lush gardens, meets the challenges of learning a new language, tours regions from Sicily to the Veneto, and faces transitions in her family life. Filled with recipes from her Tuscan kitchen and written in the sensuous and evocative prose that has become her hallmark, Bella Tuscany is a celebration of the sweet life in Italy."

Frances Mayes (Author), Frances Mayes (Narrator)

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Under the Tuscan Sun

"#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved memoir of self-discovery set against the spectacular Tuscan countryside that inspired the major motion picture starring Diane Lane-now in a twentieth-anniversary edition featuring a new afterword "This beautifully written memoir about taking chances, living in Italy, loving a house and, always, the pleasures of food, would make a perfect gift for a loved one. But it's so delicious, read it first yourself."-USA Today For more Frances Mayes, including a tour of her now iconic Cortona home, Bramasole, watch PBS's Dream of Italy: Tuscan Sun Special! More than twenty years ago, Frances Mayes-widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer-introduced readers to a wondrous new world when she bought and restored an abandoned Tuscan villa called Bramasole. Under the Tuscan Sun inspired generations to embark on their own journeys-whether that be flying to a foreign country in search of themselves, savoring one of the book's dozens of delicious seasonal recipes, or simply being transported by Mayes's signature evocative, sensory language. Now with a new afterword from Frances Mayes, the twentieth-anniversary edition of Under the Tuscan Sun revisits the book's most popular characters."

Frances Mayes (Author), Frances Mayes (Narrator)

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