Under the Tuscan Sun

Frances Mayes, an American poet and former creative writing professor, is the protagonist and narrator of Under the Tuscan Sun. Born in Georgia in 1940, Mayes established a literary career as a poet before her 1990 purchase of Bramasole, an abandoned villa in Cortona, Tuscany. Her memoir became a touchstone for a late 20th-century fascination with experiential travel and cultural immersion. In the memoir, she frames the demanding work of restoring a house and land as a path toward healing and reinvention after a painful divorce. The quest for a house in Italy is deeply tied to her search for a new identity. “The house is a metaphor for the self, of course, but it also is totally real,” she writes, linking the physical act of restoration to the process of rebuilding her own life (11).

Mayes’s background as a poet from the American South shapes the memoir’s lyrical and reflective voice. Her aesthetic sensibilities inform her descriptions of the landscape, food, and the sensory details of her new life as she finds parallels between the Tuscan culture and the Southern culture she grew up with, adding an element of reconnection with her past to her search for home.