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Category: Travel
Description: The author who unforgettably captured the experience of starting a new life in Tuscany in bestselling travel memoirs expands her horizons to immerse herself--and her readers--in the sights, aromas, and treasures of twelve new special places. A Year in the World is vintage Frances Mayes--a celebration of the allure of travel, of serendipitous pleasures found in unlikely locales, of memory woven into the present, and of a joyous sense of quest. An ideal travel companion, Frances Mayes brings to the page the curiosity of an intrepid explorer, remarkable insights into the wonder of the everyday, and a compelling narrative style that entertains as it informs. With her beloved Tuscany as a home base, Mayes travels to Spain, Portugal, France, the British Isles, and to the Mediterranean world of Turkey, Greece, the South of Italy, and North Africa. In Andalucía, she relishes the intersection of cultures. She cooks in Portugal, gathers ideas in the gardens of England and Scotland, takes a literary pilgrimage to Burgundy, discovers an ideal place to live in Mantova, and explores the essential Moroccan city of Fez. She rents houses among ordinary residents, shops at neighborhood markets, wanders the back streets, and everywhere contemplates the concept of home. While in Greece, she follows the classic Homeric voyage across the Aegean, lives in a bougainvillea-draped stone house in Crete, and then drives deep into the Mani. In Turkey with friends, she sails the ancient coast, hiking to archaeological sites and snorkeling over sunken Byzantine towns. Weaving together personal perceptions and informed commentary on art, architecture, history, landscape, and social and culinary traditions of each area, Mayes brings the immediacy of life in her temporary homes to the reader. An illuminating and passionate book that will be savored by all who loved Under the Tuscan Sun, A Year in the World is travel writing at its peak.
eBook Publisher: Random House, Inc./Broadway,
Books By Dames Release Date: April 2006

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Available eBook Formats [Secure Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/eReader (recommended)/Adobe PDF - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT [507 KB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT [699 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT [413 KB], SECURE ADOBE PDF FORMAT [1.6 MB]
All formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"Mayes displays a gift for conveying everyday life through her writing . . . and presents a simpler, less frantic version of how to live one’s life." -- USA Today

"Frances Mayes is, before all else, a wonderful writer." -- Chicago Tribune

Blood Oranges

Andalucía

Who cut down the moon's stem?

(Left us roots Of water.)
How easy to pluck flowers from This infinite acacia.

—FEDERICO GARCíA LORCA

January, old Janus face looking left at the past year and right toward the new. I'm for the new—no mournful backward glance. Make tracks, I write one night on the steamed kitchen window.

The year began with a break-in at my house while my husband and I were finishing dinner. Ed had just tipped the last of a vino nobile into our glasses. Laughing, we were talking about the turn of the year, with Nina Simone crooning "The Twelfth of Never" to us. We'd cleared the plates, the candles were burning down, and outside the dining room window we saw only our potted lemon trees, swaying snapdragons, and yellow Carolina jasmine, for January in California is a blessed season.

In a flash, everything changed. A man crashed through the living room window, screaming that he wanted to die, then loomed on the middle of the rug, his bundled body in ski jacket, droopy pants, and homeboy hat pulled down around his moony face. Even as I write this, my heart starts to pound.

"Give me a knife," he shouted. "I've never done this before, but I'm doing it now." I thought, not does he have a gun will we die, but he's goofy. Then terror pumped through every vein in my body. This can't be happening! Somehow, we'd stood up. Run. My chair tipped over. He lunged into the dining room. I threw my glass of wine in his face, and as he wiped his eyes, we ran out the back door. "I want to die," he shouted to us as we fled into a street darkened by conscientious neighbors in the middle of the latest corruption-engineered energy crisis. Our house was blazing like the Titanic; lights flared in every window. Our intruder had been drawn to us like a fluttering moth toward the screen door on a soft southern night.

Ed grabbed a phone on the way out and somehow called 911 as he sprinted across the street. We ran to separate neighbors, hoping to find someone at home on Saturday night. Startled new Chinese neighbors brought me in and handed me the telephone, though they must have thought I was mad, while the intruder followed Ed across the street to our neighbors Arlene and Dan. Interrupted in the middle of a dinner party, they pulled Ed in and slammed the door. Then our intruder broke through their door—just as the police drove up.

That was the beginning. The drugged young man was on the street again in a month. I found his sunglasses in a flower bed. Expensive. I threw them in the trash. The year rolled on and doesn't bear thinking about. Suffice to say the words surgery, hospitals, deaths. As the sublime September weather arrived, we all experienced the mind-altering, world-shaking attack on America. Go, bad year. May the stars realign.

Now, Janus, my friend, I am going to Spain for a winter month in Andalucía. Andalucía, land of the orange and the olive tree. Land of passionate poets and flamenco dancers and late-night dinners with guitar music in jasmine-scented gardens.

Ed flew to Italy a week ago because, as always, we have some complicated building project in progress. En route to Spain, he has detoured to Bramasole, our house in Cortona, to see about the drilling of a well for a nine-hundred-year-old house we have bought in the mountains. We want to accomplish a historic restoration on this stone house built by hermit monks who followed Saint Francis of Assisi. When I last talked to him, the dowser had felt his stick bend in exactly the spot where I did not want a well and had drilled down a hundred meters without finding a drop. We are planning to meet in Madrid.

From San Francisco, I board a flight to Paris and am happy to see my seatmate take out a book instead of a computer. No white aura and tap-tapping for the ten-hour flight. She looks as if she could have been one of my colleagues at the university. Is she going to Europe to research a fresco cycle or to join an archaeological team at a Roman villa excavation? I take out my own book, ready to escape into silence for the duration. She smiles and asks, "What are you reading?"

"A biography of Federico García Lorca—getting ready for Spain. What are you reading?"

"Oh, a book on John three thirteen."

"Three thirteen. I don't know that verse. We used to sing 'John three sixteen, John three sixteen' in rounds at Methodist Sunday school."

The flight attendant comes by with champagne and orange juice. "Just water," my seatmate and I say in unison. We begin to talk about travel and books, chatting easily, though I am, at first, waiting for a chance to retreat. We know nothing of each other and will part when the scramble to exit at Charles de Gaulle begins.

She asks a lot of questions. I tell her I am a former university teacher, now a full-time writer. I tell her about living part of the year in Italy, and that Italy has given me several books, written with joy. She probes. Are my books published? Are they popular? And if so, do I know why? What do I try to accomplish with my writing? How do I feel about people's responses to my books? On and on. I tell her that I'm embarking on the first of many travels and that I hope to write a book about my experiences. Why? What will I be looking for? I am drawn into lengthy explanations. I say I'm interested in the idea and fact of home. I'm going to places where I have dreamed of living and will try to settle down in each, read the literature, look at the gardens, shop for what's in season, try to feel at home. I'm talking more openly than usual with a stranger. Is she a psychiatrist?

"And you've never felt God's hand on yours?" She looks quizzically at me.

"No. I've felt lucky, though."

"Maybe you are bringing happiness to people through the will of God. Maybe." She smiles.

She answers my own questions evasively. She is holding something back, even in the basic exchanges, such as whether she is on vacation, that simple opening into conversation. Our little equation is out of balance. Finally, I ask bluntly, "What do you do?"

"I . . . I guess you could say I'm a speaker."

"On what subjects?"

Silence. She is gazing out the window. She is a very still person. "I'm part of a foundation. We try to help in communities with severe problems."

Copyright © 2006 by Frances Mayes