Under the Tuscan Sun

Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy (1996) is a best-selling travel memoir by American poet and professor Frances Mayes. The book chronicles Mayes’s experience of purchasing and restoring an abandoned villa, Bramasole, in the Tuscan countryside. Her physical restoration of the house and its land becomes a parallel journey of personal and emotional growth as she immerses herself in the local culture, food, and rhythms of Italian life. The memoir was a #1 New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a popular 2003 film. Mayes has written several other books about her life in Italy, including Bella Tuscany (1999) and Every Day in Tuscany (2010). Under the Tuscan Sun explores themes of The Restorative Power of Place, Finding Joy in the Sensual Details of Daily Life, and Embracing Risk and Reinventing the Self.

This guide refers to the 2016 Broadway Books revised paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of death.

Summary

Frances Mayes, a recently divorced American professor and poet, and her new partner, Ed, commit to buying an abandoned Tuscan villa named Bramasole after several summers spent looking for the perfect house. The purchase process is chaotic, involving a fast-talking Italian notary, or notaio, and under-the-table payment arrangements proposed by the seller, Dr. Carta. As she navigates the bureaucracy and her financial anxieties, Mayes reflects on her painful divorce and her four-summer-long search for a new life, which has become intertwined with finding a house in Italy. After the sale is finalized, they receive two large, ancient iron keys. They arrive at the partially cleaned house and share their first meal on the terrace, feeling an immediate sense of belonging.

Their first summer is spent on the immense task of clearing the neglected property. They battle scorpions and spiders as they remove thousands of old wine bottles and years of debris from the house and its outbuildings. They establish a rudimentary kitchen and begin to immerse themselves in cooking the simple, fresh food of the region. They hire a local geometra, a project manager and liaison with local officials, to plan the extensive restoration, which will include a new kitchen, updated bathrooms, and sandblasting the faux-finished chestnut beams.

After interviewing several contractors, they choose local Primo Bianchi, who reveals he once worked on the house decades earlier. Their initial progress is halted when the villa’s well, which the seller had praised, runs dry during a severe drought. Forced to buy a truckload of water from a friend of their agent, they realize the major restoration must wait for building permits that will take months to secure. They lock up the empty house and return to their jobs in California for the winter.

Mayes returns the following June to find that the new, deep well is almost complete. She and Ed begin the arduous work of clearing the five acres of overgrown land. In the process, they uncover an ingenious, ancient water-management system, including stone rainwater chutes, a large antique stone sink buried in the dirt, and a hidden natural spring. They also face the daunting project of rebuilding a collapsed 120-foot-long stone retaining wall. They hire an unreliable contractor who employs three skilled Polish workers. The contractor performs shoddy work, but the workers, however, secretly alert Mayes and Ed to the mistakes and, despite the difficulties, complete a beautiful and sturdy wall.

During this time, Mayes begins to form a community, meeting her expatriate neighbors and a formidable writer, Elizabeth David, who becomes a close friend. While cleaning the interior walls, one of the Polish workers, Cristoforo, discovers a large, naive-style fresco of a lake scene on the dining room wall, which Mayes and Ed help to fully uncover.

At the end of summer, the main interior renovation begins disastrously. After Mayes returns to the US, Ed stays behind to oversee the sandblasting of the beams, a chaotic process that covers the entire house in a thick layer of sand. Their chosen contractor is suddenly scheduled for surgery, so they hire their second choice. A series of faxes from Italy details ongoing disasters: The new contractor breaks his leg, and the house nearly collapses when workers improperly open an interior wall.

At the beginning of their Christmas break, Mayes and Ed arrive to find the house in chaos, with deep channels for heating pipes cut into every wall and rubble piled everywhere. They spend a discouraging holiday in Elizabeth’s borrowed house. After returning to the US for the winter, Ed returns to Bramasole the following spring to begin the massive cleanup and finishing work himself.

Mayes joins him in June. They work relentlessly for three weeks to make the house habitable for their first houseguests, who are arriving for a friend’s wedding. They stain the beams, paint the rooms, and meticulously restore the brick floors. Despite lingering issues, such as hot water being plumbed to the toilets, they successfully host a prenuptial dinner before their friend Susan’s wedding in the Cortona town hall. The installation of marble countertops in the new kitchen marks the end of the major interior work.

With the house largely complete, Mayes and Ed settle into the rhythm of Tuscan life. Mayes finds renewed joy in cooking in her new kitchen, drawing inspiration from the local markets and seasonal ingredients, and they commission a long yellow table for outdoor meals that becomes the center of their social life. They take a week-long trip to the Maremma, a wilder region of Tuscany, to explore Etruscan tombs and taste regional wines.

Mayes observes how they are “turning Italian,” particularly Ed, who adopts local driving habits and develops a deep, instinctual connection to farming the land. They experience their first full winter at Bramasole, beginning with the olive harvest. With help from their caretaker, they pick the olives from their 150 trees and take them to a local mill, receiving their first batch of intensely green, peppery oil. Their daughter, Ashley, and her boyfriend arrive for a peaceful, food-focused Christmas.

They undertake one final major project: opening the thick wall between the living room and the old, unused farmer’s (contadina) kitchen. They re-hire their first-choice contractor, who has recovered from his surgery. The “five-day” project stretches to 21 days when workers discover three layers of stone flooring that must be excavated by hand and a rotten ceiling beam that needs replacement. On the final day, as they celebrate the project’s completion with guests, the contractor (who is working on the second floor) accidentally kicks over a bucket of cement, which pours through a hole in the ceiling directly onto Mayes’s head, providing a humorous, final “christening” for the restoration.

In the end, Mayes reflects on the meaning of her new life. She feels a profound sense of being “at home,” connecting the sensory details of Tuscany to her childhood in the American South. She is drawn to the local Catholic culture of saints and relics, not as a believer, but as an observer of the human need for wonder and memory. As the summer ends, she feels the profound change the house has wrought, giving her a new sense of place and the pleasure of a life she has built with her own hands. In her 20th anniversary Afterword, Mayes confirms that the risk she took was one of the best decisions of her life; her connection to Bramasole and its community has only deepened over two decades.