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A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure
Books: CookBooks: Cooking Tours: Item 8
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A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventureby Marlena De Blasi
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26 of 36 people found the following review helpful: Enchanting Memoir of Rural Tuscan Life., January 10, 2005 Reviewer:B. Marold (Bethlehem, PA United States) - `A Thousand Days in Tuscany' by American (transplanted to Italy), Marlena De Blasi is a sequel to her `A Thousand Days in Venice'. While I have not read the earlier work, I sense that both are personal memoirs of her life in Italy with her companion Fernando, with culinary grace notes and comments. The number of stars to be rewarded to Ms. De Blasi's work is complicated by the fact that there are several excellent works on living and eating in Tuscany, so the bar is set pretty high. Leading the pack by far is the great culinary memoir by Patience Gray, `Honey from a Weed'. Another very high quality work is `The Tuscan Year' by Elizabeth Romer. On culinary points alone, Ms. De Blasi's work is pretty weak, as the book contains a scant nine recipes for pretty routine stuff. Fortunately, this book should not be weighed on this score alone, even though Amazon.com conned me into buying it by having it come up in new releases of culinary titles. The book is more valuable as a picture of life through the seasons as seen by an American, with much the same tone as Frances Mayes `Under the Tuscan Sun'. And yet, the book is less than perfect on this score as well. I am a little puzzled by the fact that while the title of the book promises a thousand days, the text covers one calendar year. I also found some of the narrative just a bit confusing. For many pages, the writing seemed to confuse Barlozzo with the character of their ducal landlord, about whom Barlozzo often complains. I also found some of the writing just a bit inept in the use of some words, as when the author describes Barlozzo's speech as `semantic'. I quite honestly believe the author simply did not have a firm grip on the meaning of `semantic' when she used it in this context. As a former professional philosopher and student of the philosophy of language, I assure you dear reader that this word use was at least confusing. In spite of all those rants, this is an exceedingly pleasant book to read. It evokes Italian rural life in such a way that I an literally encouraged to get on a plane to Italy and spend a year there myself, if Madame Mayes and De Blasi and company have not already convinced half the English speaking world to do the same thing. I will not bore you with recounting the events of the book, as other reviews have covered this very well. I will say that this volume is much better than some other discussions of Tuscan life such as those from Mary Ann Esposito (`Chao Italia in Tuscany') and Pino Luongo (`Simply Tuscan'). While these volumes have a lot of worthy culinary material, they fail as genuine reflections of Tuscan life. Recommended to anyone who enjoys Frances Mayes books on living in Tuscany.
From Publishers Weekly
From its opening scene of an impromptu alfresco village feast of fried zucchini blossoms, fennel-roasted pork, and pudding made from the cream of a local blue-eyed cow, this memoir of the seasons in a small Tuscan village is rich with food, weather, romance and, above all, life. De Blasi continues the adventures begun in her A Thousand Days in Venice, as she and her husband, Fernando, leave Venice for Tuscany in search of "a place that still remembers real life sweet and salty each side of life dignifying the other." Fortunately, the two are adopted by Barlozzo, an elderly local eager to share his knowledge of the old ways. He introduces them to the local customs: grape harvesting, truffle hunting, bread baking, etc. Although the book teems with food references, including recipes for intriguing traditional dishes, de Blasi is more than a sunny regional food writer—she digs into the meaning of life. As she fights Fernando's periodic depressions and brings him back to joy, gains Barlozzo's trust and love, learns his troubling lifelong secrets and comes to terms with the death of a beloved friend, she immerses her readers in life's poignancy, brevity and wonder.
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Readers who enjoyed de Blasi's earlier work, A Thousand Days in Venice (2002), may be startled that the author has moved from Venice to Tuscany. Still much in love with the man for whom she left everything, de Blasi embarks on an idyllic, if hardworking, Tuscan life. The couple purchases an old farmhouse and is chagrined that it's not conveyed in the condition promised. Their neighbors welcome them to the community with a groaning board featuring all manner of Tuscan foods and capped off with a dessert that only hours earlier had been milked from a "blue-eyed" cow. As in her earlier work, most chapters close with recipes, ranging in complexity from braised pork stew that serves as both a pasta sauce and an entree to simple bruschetta, toasted bread topped with local olive oil. Thanks to de Blasi's style of rendering conversations first in Italian, then English, a careful reader can quickly pick up some useful conversational Italian. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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