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A Thousand Days in Venice (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
: :He saw her across the Piazza San Marco and fell in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later, he knows it is fate. He knows little English; and she, a divorced American chef, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thinks she is incapable of intimacy, that her heart has lost its capacity for romantic love. But within months of their first meeting, she has packed up her house in St. Louis to marry Fernando—“the stranger,” as she calls him—and live in that achingly lovely city ...
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A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure
: :They had met and married on perilously short acquaintance, she an American chef and food writer, he a Venetian banker. Now they were taking another audacious leap, unstitching their ties with exquisite Venice to live in a roughly renovated stable in Tuscany.Once again, it was love at first sight. Love for the timeless countryside and the ancient village of San Casciano dei Bagni, for the local vintage and the magnificent cooking, for the Tuscan sky and the friendly church bells. Love especially for old Barlozzo, the village mago, who escorts the newcomers ...
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That Summer in Sicily: A Love Story
: :'From de Blasi (The Lady in the Palazzo, 2007, etc.), a fragrant tale of life and love in the mountains of Sicily.Shortly after the Venetian interlude she luxuriously captured in A Thousand Days in Venice (2002), the author accepted an assignment to write a magazine article on the interior regions of Sicily. Like many other journalists, she was met by silence from the wary Sicilians. She was about to retire to the mainland when she stumbled upon Villa Donnafugata, whose romantic turrets, towers, balconies and chromatically tiled roof were surrounded by gardens, ...
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The Lady in the Palazzo: At Home in Umbria
: :With the breathless anticipation that seduced her readers to fall in love with Venice and then Tuscany, Marlena de Blasi now takes us on a new journey as she moves with her husband, Fernando, to Orvieto, a large and ancient city in Italy's Umbria. Having neither an edge to a sea nor a face to a foreign land, it's a region less trampled by travelers and, in turn, less accepting of strangers. So de Blasi sets out to establish her niche in this new place and to win over her new neighbors ...
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The Lady in the Palazzo: An Umbrian Love Story
: :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. Now she takes readers on a journey into the heart of Orvieto, an ancient city in the less-trodden region of Umbria. 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 ...
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A Taste of Southern Italy: Delicious Recipes and a Dash of Culture
: :“It has always been true for me that to know a place, I must first know how it eats and drinks. Everything unravels at the table.” –Marlena de BlasiMarlena de Blasi’s lifelong affair with cooking began at age nine on a beach along the coast of southern Italy, where she met an elderly woman roasting potatoes coated with olive oil, rosemary, and sea salt over an open fire.Now, in A Taste of Southern Italy, de Blasi brings to life the spirit as well as the cuisine of this bountiful region. With de ...
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Regional Foods of Northern Italy: Recipes and Remembrances
: :This is a cookbook like no other. It evokes the essence of Northern Italy's traditional foods in a beautifully wrought amalgam of recipe and narrative. It beckons you across the wet stone of Venice's Rialto bridge into a candlelit fifteenth-century cantina. It invites you down a forest road in Umbria, where grappa-fortified fishermen toss trout onto a wood fire and stage a sunset feast. It proffers nearly two hundred recipes from the heart and soul of Italy's North, including:• Risotto allo Zafferano Milanese • Arista! Arista! •• Pasta delle Sfogliatrici • Pesce ...
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Regional Foods of Southern Italy
: Review:In Regional Foods of Southern Italy, Marlena De Blasi looks into the essential spirit of the eight regions encompassing the lower half of Italy south from Rome and out to the islands west of the tip of the boot. She believes that to cook from a particular region, understanding its history is as important as gathering recipes. 'A cuisine that aspires to dignity even in the midst of insufficiency,' this cooking of the poor is based on sheep's milk cheeses, swordfish, wild bitter greens, and whatever else cruel and capricious yet bountiful ...
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A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Romance
: :Continuing from A Thousand Days in Venice, this is the story of Marlena and her Venetian husband, Fernando, as they make a life for themselves in rural Tuscany. Amongst the many people they befriend is Barluzzo, an old sage who takes the couple under his wing and initiates them in the age-old traditions of Tuscan life: since their house lacks electricity, he helps them build a traditional brick oven in the garden; in autumn he wakes them at dawn to gather chestnuts and porcini mushrooms, and at the onset of winter he ...
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The Lady in the Palazzo: At Home in Umbria
: :From village feasts and rustic tavernas to ancient piazzas and moonlit balconies, the smells and tastes and sounds and soul of Umbria come alive in bestselling author Marlena de Blasi's evocative memoir. Unabridged. 8 CDs.
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