A Year in the Village of Eternity

by Tracey Lawson

Book by Lawson, Tracey

Genres: Nonfiction, Food, Italy, Travel, Health, Cookbooks, Memoir

384 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 2010

Reviews

[Eden · Rating 5 out of 5]

2019 bk 391. Have you ever picked up a book that was so well written that you could smell the food as it was being prepared? If you havn't, you might want to try A Year in the Village of Eternity. The book is called this because the village of Campodimele, Italy has the highest percentage of folks over the age of 90 in the entire country. To add to that, these are not senior citizens who are resting on their laurels - but rather farmers that still farm, housewives that still can, preserve, cook, and clean both genders doing what they have done for the past fifty plus years. The author moved into the village for a year and follows the calendar as she interviews and learns that "everything has its time", it's time when it is at its best to eat and preserve. There are rarely any preservative chemicals in this villages food. Recipes are provided. This book is a joy for the eyes, the nose, the mouth (you didn't think I'd get by without trying at least one recipe, did you?). Enjoy!

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a real treat for foodies everywhere. The book is divided into months of the year so that we follow the villagers through their year of cultivating, harvesting, preserving and sharing their food with friends and family. We become familiar with many of the villagers and the author describes the preparation, cooking and eating of the food so vividly, my mouth waters almost constantly. Sadly, the quality of ingredients available to us in the UK means that it isn't posslble to recreate most of the dishes with any hope of authenticity.

[Kasia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must admit, I was excited about this book but found it quite boring. Yet another book by non-Italian in love with Italian food and lifestyle, written in a language heavy with overdone metaphors ("...the breath of orange blossom on a balmy spring night, whispering on your skin like a lover's sigh."). Too much for me.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. I've been trying to improve my family's eating habits, and keep seeing references to the virtues of a Mediterranean diet. The medical papers always say something like, "and yet the food is not the whole story; the benefits of the Mediterranean diet are also attributed to the lifestyle, the sources of the ingredients, the social aspect of the meals," and so on. And the cookbook I bought (The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, by Nancy Harmon Jennings), like most sources I have found, has wonderful recipes from all over the Mediterranean: Greece, Tunisia, Spain, Morocco, Italy, France, Lebanon.

Yet each of these places (maybe each area in each country) has its own typical cuisine based on its own lifestyle. This book is a complete story of one of those cuisines. The town of Campodimele is an Italian mountain town built around a medieval walled city. It is famous for the longevity of its inhabitants, who are frequently active and hard-working into their eighties and nineties.

The book follows these people month by month through a year, each chapter focusing on one component of the diet (olives, greens, bread, game animals, etc.), how it is produced, gathered, preserved, prepared, cooked, and eaten. Yes, there are recipes, or more accurately, instructions for preparation, but it is not a cookbook. It is a way of life.

Maybe I can't replicate this lifestyle, but my local farmer's market is today. I will look at it with new eyes.

[Magdalena · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5* za przepisy kulinarne oraz pomysł na książkę, wtrącane włoskie zdania i opisaną atmosferę, za przydatny słowniczek pojęć kulinarnych,

1.5* za treść i brak sensownej redakcji oryginału - autorka w kółko powtarza, że sezonowe gotowanie jest rozsądne, że lokalne produkty są pyszne, że korzystanie ze świeżych, lokalnych i sezonowych produktów jest bardzo ważne dla zdrowia, że korzystanie z lokalnych (i sezonowych! nie zapominać o sezonowych!) produktów jest o wiele tańsze, że kuchnie, gdzie przygotowuje się te wszystkie sezonowe i lokalne produkty mają setki lat, a przepisy przechodzą z babci na wnuczkę, że fantastycznie jest uprawiać przydomowy ogródek, gdzie możemy sobie te lokalne i sezonowe produkty zbierać i upychać w spiżarni (naszej własnej, sezonowej, lokalnej). Poetyckie opisy przyrody pominę wymownym milczeniem.

Podejrzewam, że te wszystkie te powtórzenia musiały doprowadzić tłumaczkę i redaktorów wersji polskiej do rwania włosów z głowy. Rada za darmo: posmarujcie łysiejące czaszki oliwą (koniecznie lokalną) - może włosy odrosną (ale dopiero w sezonie na włosy).

[Eliz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I expected the book to have a lot of food, but that is pretty much all it has. The recipes are pretty much not something anyone not living in the area can do so they add to frustration. She hints at changes like outside jobs and others but explores none of it. Food maybe an important part of longevity but it is not the whole story. This book was a great disappointment in it's one layer dimension.

[Sandybeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was not what I expected. I have had it in my library for a few years now and bought it after my husband heard an interview with the author on the radio. I was disappointed to find that it was really just an Italian recipe book with each preceding chapter describing a villager making the recipe. I expected the book to contain far more information and research about longevity and healthy living rather than descriptions of the author watching people cook.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Half travel book, and half cookery book. A real pleasure to read, but makes you hungry!

[Vivienne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read as part of BCBE#13 in the category of a book with City, town, village etc in title. (Read on Kindle)
This book was not what I expected: I had expected to get to know the characters, hear countless anecdotes of life in a traditional, southern Italian village, but no, this book reads more like a recipe book. Indeed, large portion of the book consists of recipes and procedures for making traditional southern Italian food. We do meet some people, Luisa, Irma, Assunta and many others, but we meet them not as characters but through their food and produce.
The chapters are organised in months of the year, highlighting the philosophy of "Ogni cosa ha Il suo momento" (Everything has its own moment) and the idea that food should be eaten when it is in season and prepared and stored for when it is not.
There is reference to the longevity of the people of Campodimele which is attributed to the freshness of their food and the lack of preservatives, but there is also a strong suggestion that tradition, community and hospitality, a joy for living, contributes too.
This is a joyous book that brings to life the traditions of southern Italian life. ***

[Valectrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book for fans of Peter Mayles’ books about Provence and Stanley Tucci’s gastronomic tour of Italy. The focus of this book is the food and approach to eating seasonally and living in harmony with the land that seems to be the foundation of life in Campodimele, the village of eternity in the title. Lawson provides a month-by-month guide to her friends as how they savor and preserve the seasonal offerings of this central Italian village and the traditional way of living. You are likely to finish every chapter hungry, but fortunately Lawson provides recipes for most of the food that she writes about. At the end what I am most hungry for is the lifestyle that is not easy but that flows at a pace formed by the land and the seasons, and not by the Zoom meeting invites and emails requests that dictate the schedule for many of us, and the community and camaraderie at the heart of the village life.

[Jennifer Lawler]

Lawson’s first book is a mix between a travelogue and a cookbook. Her passion for Italian cuisine and lifestyle is infectious. She fell in love with the culture while teaching English in Tuscany and her explorations led her to the picturesque village of Campodimele. Here the average life expectancy is 95, a whopping 20 years more than the European average.

Lawson reckons it’s down to their diet and spent a year living with the locals getting a feel for their approach to food. Here she recalls month-by-month the recipes, secrets, and nuggets of wisdom she squirreled away during her year in ‘The Village of Eternity’. A clever book packed with beautiful images and gorgeous recipes.

[Leona · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was an OK read. Didn't realize it would be more of a cookbook than anything. Almost like reading a recipe blog - here's a short story about this or that recipe, then the recipe(s) follows. I thought from the title and description that it would be about more than food. Anyway, if you really love cooking or are very into the history of various recipes or food storage practices and such, you'll probably love it.

[Michaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writer's passion for Italy, its people and its food made me yearn to go back! Lawson is simply an exquisite writer who literally brought even the smallest of ingredients to life in my mouth. She had me longing to immerse myself in Italian living again! I hope it won't be long till we can read more of her writings and musing.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Assuming you don’t want to read one recipe after another, it’s not a long book. It’s also not an in depth look at a traditional community so much as a brief overview with interchangeable characters.
Nice idea, but it has been done better by others

[Abby Bogle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the descriptions of life in the village and the food made there, but was hoping for some more medical information/references to studies on the longevity of the population. In reality, it reads more like cookbook combined with a food blog.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful!

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably never going to make any of the recipes-but I still loved all the stories and people behind these fresh as fresh can be ways of cooking and living from ones garden

[Sydnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chance to read about food, the seasonality of it in this tiny Italian town and how it's shaped and been shaped by the people, plus local recipes is basically the ideal balm during chaotic times.

[Cynthia Grasshoff]

THIS IS NOT Under the Tuscan Sun! This is SOOO much more! Beautifully detailed; a journey of the senses. Loved and will re-read. Long for Italy and it's love of nature, food and friendship.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful book with lots of details, if you like natural food and real-life people you should enjoy this book.

[Booknblues · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tracey Lawson takes on a year long food preparation and dining tour of an ancient walled city in Italy, named Campodimele. Sauces, breads, pizzas, pastas and sausages are shared in abundance. We find the smallest of occasions to gather round and have a community feast. The wood cutters are done cutting and loading wood on their ponies for the season, so lets gather up on the hill and have a community picnic! Tracey adds to this wonderful moment by adding pictures of the horses to the book.

Campodimele is one of those places in which people live to ripe old age and have low cholesterol with few health problems, so I had expected that this might be one of those texts which examine their lives in miniscule and try to determine how we might apply these to our lives. Tracey instead invites us to share the experience with each small section dealing with a seasonal item and accompanying recipes.

We do get good advice while tagging around Campodimele with Tracey, we learn to use what we can find scavenging for bitter greens, cherries and mushrooms on the hills around Campodimele, we learn to use what we have and that the cucina povera or kitchen of poverty can produce delicious results, we learn to take the time to make the food from scratch rather than buying processed foods, and we learn the importance of the orto or kitchen garden.

I want to share Tracey’s excursion to make gnocchi and see if you don’t love the experience:
“What does surprise me, when I take up this invitation one chilly afternoon, is the breathtaking force with which she pummels the gnocchi paste and the swiftness with which they are made. Not because I’ve always understood gnocchi -making to require the gentlest of hands and a lot of time. But because I can’t imagine where she gets such strength to knead the gnocchi dough, and such speed in serving them up.

Marietta is eighty-nine and lives alone in her centuries-old stone house on one of the winding cobbled streets that follow the curve of Campodimele’s medieval walls. Her kitchen is tiny -- the size of a large cupboard-- but perfectly arranged an stocked so that she has everything on hand when I drop by to discuss when we might make the said gnocchi. ‘Ora!’ she insists, unfazed by the notion of improvising a cookery class on the spur of the moment. “Now!” She is already spooning coffee into the aluminum Moka pot and placing it on the stove: hospitality is, it seems the first duty of every Italian.”

[Stacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Step by step, this memoir takes you through each month in a year that the author lived in a small, mountainous medieval village in Italy. This town is renowned for the good health and long life of the inhabitants, mostly due to the healthy, organic, homegrown food they consume and the generous amount of physical exercise they enjoy.

For each month, there are several vignettes concerning the various food-centered traditions and recipes using seasonal foods. For example, making tomato sauce in July, hunting wild boar in October, baking a traditional Easter cake in April. Some of the dishes are simple to the point of obviousness (almost), like raw vegetables dipping in olive oil; others may seem unlikely to be recreated in the American home (like home cured pork sausage). But overall, it's a good balance between the two extremes.

The book is very lightly edited for the American audience. The author is Scottish and her dialect is preserved, along with metric measurements; only the essential changes have been made most to the recipes where some of the kilos are also shown as pounds. You may either find this confusing or faithful to the original text, depending on your level of familiarity with British phrases.

Also, once the author introduces an Italian word she often uses only that word as she writes. It wasn't until the end that I realized there was an index of defined Italian words at the end of the book. If I had realized that before, it probably would have saved me a few head scratching moments. ("What's a contorno again?" Flip back 50 pages for definition. "Oh! A vegetable side dish. Ok!")

I never did figure out what brought the author to this random place in the first place. I might have liked a little more background on her, to know her more personally. Still, it was nice to see this interesting part of the world vicariously through her eyes.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

The description of this book tells you most of what you need to know. I wanted to read it the way one might read A Year in Provence, but I couldn't do it. The Author is extremely respectful of the characters, and it isn't really about the characters as individuals --they're just all interchangeable pieces in the perfection that is Campodimele. They eat perfectly. And the data indicates that their perfect eating and lifestyle make them healthier than the rest of us.

So this is a description of a diet and lifestyle that is almost certainly better than mine or yours, and so it is hard to forget that this is a lesson rather than a story.

I think the useful thing about this book is the clear description of what it requires to grow/raise/cook all your own food. I think the author romanticizes her own descriptions -- when people spend days preserving homemade tomato sauce, she describes the resulting meals as "slow fast food", because hearing the tomato sauce is fast. You could say dinner took 30 minutes, or you could say it took 6 months, depending on your perspective. These people spend every waking moment on their food. Even so, the life they lead can sound idyllic only because so much of the town has gone away to earn
Money--making luxuries like meat and packaged pasta possible.

I'd like to eat the way they do, but not badly enough to spend every waking minute pursuing it.

[June Pecchia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was sold on this book from the beginning, since my husband's grandfather was born in Campodimele, and his grandmother in Lenola, just a hilltop away. We visited Campodimele and saw the family home in June 2006, right before author Tracey Lawson began her stay. The village is full of friendly people and wonderful food, we know! Two places where we had wonderful meals were "La Ruela" and "E... Spunta La Luna!" (that means 'Hey... up popped the moon!"

Still, I wasn't expecting great writing to go along with the information I wanted from Lawson's book. I am now reading the chapter for March, and I have been very pleasantly surprised with the quality of prose... Lawson has captured some of the magic of this place.

Read this and try some of this village's generously shared recipes... the philosophy may get hold of you and call you there for the real thing.

[Tessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Done with this one quickly. It all sounds very romantic, and Lawson's writing about the landscape and the seasons is lovely. But most of these recipes I wouldn't be able to make (although I'd blissfully eat them!) and the descriptions soon get tiresome. After the preface, there's no more mention of health and the ways this lifestyle contributes to the extraordinary longevity of Campodimele's residents. I love mushrooms and homemade pasta as much as anyone, but I guess I just didn't want to read a whole book of it. Not much use unless you are able to move to Italy for a year. And in the whole book . . . 350 pages . . . only two pages devoted to the wine harvest (and it's in a chapter about fruit??)

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A heart warming account about 'The Real Olivio People', as Tracy Lawson spends a year in the small medieval town of Campodimele in an attempt to discover the secret to why they live to an average age of 95 and remain so active. Genes, environment, social interaction and exercise are among the factors, but Lawson concentrates on what they eat 'cibo genuino' or genuine food, which is almost totally home produced 'tutto cose nostre'. From picking the olives in January for oil to harvesting the wheat in August for bread and pasta making, Lawson takes us through a month by month culinary journey of food preparation and preservation, with delicious recipes at the end of each month. A truly enjoyable book about how well we should all eat and hopefully live long.

[Barry Lillie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An easy enough read for a memoir but I found much of it very repetitive as if the author couldn't find another way of saying something she'd previously commented upon so just repeated herself. The text is littered with far too many metaphors for an ex-journalist, who I assume saw this less as a report about life there and more of a literary piece. The title is misleading as there's actually very little about longevity in the book as it's short chapters with recipes tagged onto the end. The residents of the town make appearances throughout, but these are all one dimensional and we get to learn very little about the people themselves and more about whether they have a modern kitchen or not. Three stars sadly as it fell short for me.

[Terri Pickett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost finished with this book. Reading it is like a drinking hot tea in a cozy chair - refreshing, peaceful, reinvigorating, inspiring. Lawson vividly describes a small Italian village-its history, its people, a simple and meaningful way of life and most importantly, its culinary marvels based on home-grown and home-made food (with recipes!). This book reminds me of my grandmother and my upbringing - large gardens, most food made from scratch, canning and preserving for winter. I love the principles of living simply, eating fresh local food and finding joy in hard work and tradition and this book really reinforced all that for me.

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

An affirming look at a lifestyle I try to emulate, the author captures life in this small Italian town by presenting anecdotes and recipes for each month. Her intent had been to see why the townspeople experience such longevity and health and she became enamored of their lifestyle. She primarily deals with non-working people and the main meal of the day, versus a typical day. I do love that the cooking is al about proces and not recipes. A small hiccup - the intro focuses greatly on health and this is not discussed much in the book and she comments on the overall health, lack of obesity and yet the photos reflect a generally chunky, healthy but chunky, group of people.

[Kathy Szczesniak · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are looking for a book in which to learn the secrets of longevity from a scientific point of view, you could be disappointed with this book. Written in a poetic and fiction-like style, A Year in the Village of Eternity emanates passion, love, and devotion to this town's culture and history. It is a lovely read to learn about the culture of a secluded town in Italy, but it not scientific by any means. The secrets of longevity portrayed in this book are that of age old wisdom, tradition, and culture. I felt as though I were transported back in time with this book and will definitely be making some of the recipes in my own kitchen.