In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany

by David Leavitt, Mark Mitchell

The authors--expatriate Americans living in Italy--paint a vivid, heartwarming portrait of life in a southern Tuscany village as they describe their restoration of an abandoned and dilapidated farmhouse, their interaction with their colorful neighbors, and their gradual integration into the life of Maremma. Reprint.

Genres: Travel, Italy, Nonfiction, LGBT, Memoir

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Leavitt is a graduate of Yale University and a professor at the University of Florida, where he is the co-director of the creative writing program. He is also the editor of Subtropics magazine, The University of Florida's literary review.

Leavitt, who is openly gay, has frequently explored gay issues in his work. He divides his time between Florida and Tuscany, Italy.

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd never read anything by Leavitt before, but I like travel narrative (including expat memoir), so thought I'd try this one. He writes very well, though not sure if I'd rush to read any fiction of his; their acceptance as a gay couple a generation ago was a plus to hear about.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a delightful set of short essays from two American ex-pats living in Tuscany. Not all of them are about food, of course, but not surprisingly, food plays a large role.

Aside from the slightly annoying manner they have of talking about themselves in 3rd person, the only thing we wished for was that there were more essays in this little volume.

[W]e were talking about a subject that is considered most inconvenient in Italy: cholestrol. Domenico was saying that according ot an article he had just read, fried squid had more cholesterol than practically anything else, even eggs. Just then the waiter stepped up and announced that the "plates of the day" were spaghetti alla carbonara and calamari fritti. Under the circumstances, no one ordered the calamari, though we all ordered the spaghetti, which was delicious and beautiful beyond words; thin ribbons of pasta the color of a marigold, flecked with almost transparent confetti of pancetta, nested on a pure white plate. (p31 | Magini)

Some other favourite passages:

[We] bought several earthenware planters adorned in the old-fashioned syle with mythological figures and costing about fifty dollars each. (Later we saw more or less the same planters advertised in an English gardening magazine for almost a thousand pounds apiece.) [...] [W]e had read in the same gardening magazine [...] if you aren't killing things, you aren't trying hard enough. (p43 | Il Giardino)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
[D]espite their acute devotion to Nutella - that ubiquitous chocolate-and-hazelnut pasted that most European children spread on their breakfast toast - most Italians disdain peanut butter on the grounds that is is bad for the liver. (p86 | The Hershey Connection)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Once a friend of ours sublet the Paris apartment of an American woman who had lived in France for many years. After taking him on a tour of the premises, she showed him the kitchen, which was stocked with all the classic staples of French cooking: cornichons, Dijon mustard, tarragon drying in bunches. Our friend was busy admiring all these ingredients, [...] when he noticed the six boxes of Duncan Hines cake mix. "Eat anything you want," the woman said when she saw waht he was looking at, "but touch my Duncan Hines cake mix and I'll kill you."
[...]
During David's twelfth summer, he and his mother discovered from a cooking show called The Romagnolis' Table that pasta could be served with a sauce that wasn't red. The recipe in question was for spaghetti alla carbonara, and the next evening, with a sense of adventure, they prepared some. Of course they had to approximate: instead of pancetta, a hunk of salt pork, Creamettes spaghetti, "Parmesan cheese" from a green cardboard shaker. The olive oil was a pallid yellow[...] Even so, as they ate that first carbonara, it seemed to them for an instant that they could hear the Tiber flowing outside their kitchen window.
    After that-years after that - we moved to Italy. When we first arrived, of course, we disdained anything that tasted too much of America, exulting instead in the Italian-ness of the things we found at the grocery store: peppery olive oil, nearly translucent slivers of Parma ham, wheels of pecorino cheese that the salumiere cut with a wire. [...] Soon wonderful food became something we felt we could count on (a very Italian attitude . . .and then, one morning about three years later, we woke up wanting . . .peanut butter. So we went out an bought some [...] In this way it began. Cereal was next - corn flakes, Rice Krispies, even Cocoa Puffs. Then cream of mushroom soup. Then [...] (p89,90 | Turkey Tetrazzini)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Oh, how difficult it must be to be a woman in Italy! Sons are valued more than daughters, and so the only way for a woman to make amends for the tragedy of her birth is to get married and ahve a boy. And yet life is rarely easy for these boys who have been breast-fed until they were five and pushed around in strollers until they were seven. One sees them, pampered and ill-tempered, at the terme, their mothers standing anxiously at poolside in case they start to drown [...] More grown men than one might imagine stay in the children's pool because they are afraid of drowing, or think they are, since their mothers worried so much about them drowning when they were boys. (94,97 | At the Terme)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
No house is ever really finished, or finished for long. The workmen leave, months pass, you cook and spill olive oil on the terra-cotta. Spiders build webs, you brush them away and perhaps leave a fingerprint. [...] Everywhere there are things you haven't done: One room lacks a bracket for keeping the shutter open; in another a hole still needs to be drilled for the hanging of a picture. Yet for all that the house is more beautiful, not less. In the words of Margaret Drabble, it has "weathered into identity." (139 | Incompletion)

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweet read

The book Started slowly, but stay all are advised to with it. It's a charmer. For anyone who loves Italy. And Italians.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best of all the Italian memoirs by ex-pats.

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I didn't enjoy this as much as Under the Tuscan Sun, it still reinforced my dream to eventually live in a small Tuscan village.

[Luisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice essays from an American couple who moved to Italy. There are some really lovely passages, and the authors are clearly very skilled. There were just two aspects that made me give it three stars instead of four: Initially, I didn't understand that they were essays rather than one continuous narrative, so that threw me off a bit. Once I realized that, I enjoyed the book more, but it did leave me with a feeling of vague confusion. In addition, because the book is co-authored, there are a few chapters which switch from first person to third person and back (i.e., "When [David] tells Mark what has happened, Mark looks at his own documents and discovers the discrepancy...In a white rage, we hunt down Bruno.") David and Mark are the co-authors, and I imagine they took this approach to specify which person had which experience, but this switching, combined with some switching of verb tenses, was quite confusing to me.

Favorite quotes:

But it is not money that makes a home, or lack of it that keeps one from being made. (6)

The most useful thing anyone living in Italy can learn is how to be bored. (38)

In a boring country, you find that you are content more often than happy, since we make our own contentment and happiness makes itself. (39)

This story, which at the time we took to be about ingratitude and jingoism (how could anyone covet layer cake in the land of the tarte tartin?), is really about the stubborn longing for familiar things--even things at which, back home, one turned up one's nose-- that with the passage of years becomes such a distinguishing feature of expatriate life. (89)

We questioned other Americans and discovered that they, too, often fell prey to culinary nostalgia. On visits home we lorded our superior knowledge of European cookery over our friends and families, even corrected their errors...In Italy, we nearly wept over the absence of graham crackers, hoarded cans of cranberry sauce, even stole shamefacedly into the McDonald's on Piazza di Spagna to savor a Big Mac in an invisible corner, and invariably ran in to the director of the American Academy on the way out. (91)

Memory, of course, was the real culprit. As Proust knew, flavor awakens the past, which is why the longing for certain foods so often encodes a more complex longing: for remote places, for childhood, even for the childhood longing for remote places. (91-92)

When you live abroad, the ordinary and the mysterious trade places. What from a distance seemed exotic, the very things in pursuit of which you left in the first place, lose their charm, while the alchemy of time and distance reveals in commonplace things--the things you took for granted--a surprising loveliness. This may be the secret joy and sorrow of expatriate life: By virtue of living in a foreign land, you throw not merely your history but your identity into relief. The past renders an unexpected poetry. To prepare the foods of childhood becomes, in a very real sense, a brief trip home. (92)

All of us agree[d] that the rest of the evening would have to be devoted to reading in front of a fire, after we had called our families on the other side of the ocean--a distance that seems greater in Christmas Day than it does the rest of the year. (130)

[Cerealflakes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will be generous and give this three stars. This is a book of mini essays (usually 2-4 pages) about the authors' lives in their house in Tuscany. Unlike many of these Italy memoir books, they devote little time to house reconstruction. Most of these essays are about their impressions of Italians' behaviors. There was some interesting information here, but not much on things to see or do in Italy. I am not really sure what the point of the book is.

[Morgan Bruyneel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Een boek over je helemaal uit de drukke stad terugtrekken en in de natuur gaan leven op onbezoedeld Italiaans platteland. Wie droomt er niet van? Ik niet meer in elk geval. Hoe geweldig het ook moet zijn om die droom waar te maken, het hele relaas op papier zetten, levert niet noodzakelijk een goed verhaal.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book but I was really surprised when he mentioned how many of the folks in their little town moved to Hershey, PA to work. The one family they mentioned had a boy who grew up with my mother-in-law so it was quite a neat surprise to read. Small world.

[Carole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice flow - could be a guide book on how to move to Tuscany, renovate a 'barn' into a home with local expertise, learn a new culture and discover a new world - only encouraged my fanatsy - Salute' Italia!!!!!!

[Karin · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was o.k.- perhaps coming on the heels of "A Year in Provence"- which it seemed it was some what immitating- paled in comparison. It had some moments, but failed to really draw me in.

[bookinglibrarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A less-romanticized but still enticing ex-patriots' view of life in Italy. A quick and enjoyable read for those of who like these accounts.

[Cyndi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was kind of interesting, but light and a bit dated. The writing was clear...

[Joanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-written, but about not much of anything. Name-dropping puts me off.