MAYES, Frances. Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full burgundy leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 280 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996.

Frances Mayes — widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer, named the Bard of Tuscany by the New York Times — bought an abandoned villa in the hill town of Cortona in the early 1990s on what she has described as a magnificent impulse. The house was called Bramasole, from the Italian archaic verb bramare, meaning to yearn for. It had been uninhabited for decades, its terraced lands run wild, its rooms occupied by scorpions and faded frescoes and the accumulated disorder of long neglect. Mayes and her partner Ed began restoring it. She began writing about the experience.

Under the Tuscan Sun, first published by Chronicle Books in 1996, became one of the defining books of its era. It spent more than two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into more than fifty languages. The book belongs to a genre — the literary memoir of voluntary expatriation to a slower, more sensuous corner of Europe — that Peter Mayle had established with A Year in Provence in 1989, but Mayes brought to the form the resources of a poet: a precision of observation, a sensitivity to the quality of light and the texture of stone and the particular taste of wine from a specific hillside, that elevated it above the merely aspirational. The writing is in love with its subject, and the love is earned through attention rather than sentiment.

The villa, the restoration, the markets and vineyards and hill towns of the Casentino and the Valdichiana, the neighbours and the seasons and the dozens of recipes interwoven with the narrative — all of it is rendered with a vividness that made Bramasole a destination for readers long before the 2003 film adaptation directed by Audrey Wells and starring Diane Lane brought the book to an even wider audience. Mayes has continued to write about Tuscany across multiple subsequent volumes, but Under the Tuscan Sun remains the original and defining work.

Near fine. Markings to upper edge gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000497