A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi

Brimming with life and kissed by romance, The Lady in the Palazzo perfectly captures the essence of a singular place and offers up a feast-and the recipes to prepare it!-for readers of all stripes. Along the way, de Blasi befriends an array of colorful characters, including cooks and counts and shepherds and a lone violinist, cooking her way into the hearts of her Umbrian neighbors. Rich with history and a vivid sense of place, her tale is by turns romantic and sensual, joyous and celebratory, as she and her husband search for a home in this city on a hill-finding one that turns out to be the former ballroom of a dilapidated sixteenth-century palazzo. Now she takes readers on a journey into the heart of Orvieto, an ancient city in the less-trodden region of Umbria. Book Synopsis Marlena di Blasi seduced readers to fall in love with Venice, then Tuscany, with her popular and critically acclaimed books A Thousand Days in Venice and A Thousand Days in Tuscany. The author's own recipes are included.About the Book Touching and humorous, de Blasis account of moving with her husband, Fernando, to Orvieto, the largest city in Italys Umbria, is a story for those who delight in travel and share the fantasy of beginning a new life in a very different place. Barlozzo shares his knowledge of Italian farming traditions, ancient health potions, and artisanal food makers, but he has secrets he doesn't share, and one of them concerns the beautiful Floriana, whose illness teaches Marlena that happiness is truly a choice.Like the pleasurable tastes and textures of a fine meal, A Thousand Days in Tuscany is as satisfying as it is enticing. In a cauldron set over a wood fire, they braise beans in red wine, and a stew of wild boar simmers overnight in the ashes of their hearth.

Together they visit sacred festivals and taste just-pressed olive oil, drizzled over roasted country bread, and squash blossoms, battered and deep-fried and sprayed with sea-salted water. His fascinating stories lead de Blasi more deeply inside the soul of Tuscany. Their routines are not that different from those of villagers centuries earlier.They are befriended by the mesmeric Barlozzo, a self-styled village chieftain. We accompany the couple as they harvest grapes, gather chestnuts, forage for wild mushrooms, and climb trees in the cold of December to pick olives, one by one. In this patch of earth where Tuscany, Umbria, and Lazio collide, there is much to feed de Blasi's two passions-food and love. They dwell among two hundred villagers, ancient olive groves, and hot Etruscan springs. In search of the rhythms of country living, the couple moves to a barely renovated former stable in Tuscany with no phone, no central heating, and something resembling a playhouse kitchen. American chef Marlena de Blasi and her Venetian husband, Fernando, married rather late in life.

A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi