Classic travel memoirs, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1955), Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods (1998), or Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980), are defined by restless journeys and encounters with the unfamiliar. Although Under the Tuscan Sun is firmly rooted in one place, Mayes adheres to many of the conventions of the travel memoir genre, establishing her memoir’s place in the genre. Mayes’s narrative echoes the thematic concerns of travel memoirs with its focus on the rediscovery of self and the search for home and belonging. She also hews closely to the stylistic conventions of the genre with a first-person point of view and highly descriptive sensory imagery, placing the reader within her experience and developing an immersive three-dimensional portrait of the people, culture, and environment of Tuscany. With these thematic and stylistic choices, she enters into conversation with contemporary travel memoirs like Wild (2012) by Cheryl Strayed, as well as more classic examples of the genre, like John Steinbeck’s classic Travels With Charley (1962).  

Under the Tuscan Sun fits within the tradition of the travel memoir but distinguishes itself by subverting the genre’s focus on perpetual motion. Mayes’s narrative is centered on the act of putting down roots; although she travels to a foreign place to do it, her focus is on finding herself through exploring a deeper connection to just one place. Her book aligns more closely with a subgenre of place-based immersion memoirs that gained popularity in the late 20th century, most famously Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1990), which chronicles the experience of expatriate life in a single location. Though immersion memoirs are rooted in a specific place, like travelogues, their focus is on personal transformation, and their style utilizes sensory imagery to bring the location to life. Julia Childs offers another example of this type of travel memoir with My Life in France (2006), which takes readers through her experience of moving to France and falling in love with French cooking and cuisine. Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, straddles the line between travelogues and immersive memoirs; the narrative travels from Italy to Indonesia and finally Bali, but each section of the book acts as its own immersive experience, echoing the structure of Mayes’s memoir.

With Under the Tuscan Sun, Mayes pushes this concept further by using the physical restoration of her villa, Bramasole, as the central narrative framework for self-restoration. Instead of collecting experiences from many places, she excavates the layers of one. In her Preface, she hopes the reader is “like a friend who comes to visit” (xiii), framing the memoir not as an epic journey but as an intimate stay. The book becomes a chronicle of homemaking, where “the new life might shape itself to the contours of the house […] and to the rhythms around it” (12). She thoroughly explores Tuscan culture, community, and cuisine, as well as the geography and deep history of the region. By grounding her story in a single, evolving place, Mayes uses the memoir form to explore themes of belonging and identity, finding her answers anchored firmly in one place, rather than in the journey.