Bella Tuscany
The Sweet Life in Italy
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Narrated by:
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Frances Mayes
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By:
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Frances Mayes
About this listen
Frances Mayes, whose enchanting number one New York Times best seller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites listeners back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food, there and throughout Italy.
Having spent her summers in Tuscany for the past several years, Frances Mayes relished the opportunity to experience the pleasures of primavera, an Italian spring. A sabbatical from teaching in San Francisco allowed her to return to Cortona - and her beloved house, Bramasole - just as the first green appeared on the rocky hillsides.
Bella Tuscany, a companion volume to Under the Tuscan Sun, is her passionate and lyrical account of her continuing love affair with Italy. Now truly at home there, Mayes writes of her deepening connection to the land, her flourishing friendships with local people, the joys of art, food, and wine, and the rewards and occasional heartbreaks of her villa's ongoing restoration. It is also a memoir of a season of change, and of renewed possibility. As spring becomes summer she revives Bramasole's lush gardens, meets the challenges of learning a new language, tours regions from Sicily to the Veneto, and faces transitions in her family life.
Filled with recipes from her Tuscan kitchen and written in the sensuous and evocative prose that has become her hallmark, Bella Tuscany is a celebration of the sweet life in Italy.
©1999 Frances Mayes (P)1999 Random House, Inc., Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, A Division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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After surviving the accident that took her mother's life, Claire Broussard worked hard to escape her small Louisiana hometown. But these days, she feels something lacking. Abruptly leaving her lucrative job in Chicago, Claire returns home to care for her ailing grandmother. There, she unearths a beautiful sculpture that her great-grandfather sent home from Paris after World War II. At her grandmother's urging, Claire travels to Paris to track down the centuries old mask-making atelier where the sculpture was created.
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love story, a mystery, a historical novel, or all
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By: Juliet Blackwell
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They Left Us Everything
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- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After almost 20 years of caring for elderly parents - first for their senile father and then for their cantankerous 93-year-old mother - author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, 23 rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought, How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags. But the task turns out to be much harder and more rewarding than she ever imagined.
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Thought provoking
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By: Plum Johnson
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The Winemaker's Daughter
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- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Brunella Cartolano visits her father on the family vineyard in the basin of the Cascade Mountains, she's shocked by the devastation caused by a four-year drought. Passionate about the Pacific Northwest ecology, Brunella, a cultural impact analyst, is embroiled in a battle to save the Seattle waterfront from redevelopment and to preserve a fisherman's livelihood. But when a tragedy among fire-jumpers results from a failure of the water supply - her brother Niccolo is among those lost - Brunella finds herself with another mission.
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Obviously Not Read By A Washington Resident
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By: Timothy Egan
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Toast
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Toast is Nigel Slater's truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. In each chapter, as he takes listeners on a tour of the contents of his family's pantry (rice pudding, tinned ham, cream soda, mince pies, lemon drops, bourbon biscuits), we are transported.
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Nigel Slater is fabulous!
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Novella Carpenter loves cities - the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same time, she can't shake the fact that she is the daughter of two back-to-the-land hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about repeating her parents' disastrous mistakes, yet drawn to the idea of backyard self-sufficiency, Carpenter decided that it might be possible to have it both ways.
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Hmmm.
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Habibi
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For 14-year-old Liyana Abboud, life in St. Louis, Missouri is perfect. She loves shopping in the nearby stores and walking down streets where she knows everyone. Even better, she has just had her first kiss. But her father is moving the family to Jerusalem - the land where he was born. Suddenly Liyana finds herself a stranger in a threatening world.
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Very good Performance
- By Muhammad on 04-07-15
By: Naomi Shihab Nye
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Nothing with Strings
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The mundane and the miraculous stand side by side in these sketches and stories of Southern small-time life by the author of Quite a Year for Plums.
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A real jewel.
- By Mary on 12-31-08
By: Bailey White
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The Great Spring
- Writing, Zen, and This ZigZag Life
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What does it take to have a long writing life? Drawing on her years of writing, teaching, and practicing Zen, Natalie Goldberg shares the experiences that have opened her to new ways of being alive - experiences that point the way forward in our lives and our writing. The "great spring" of this book title refers to the great rush of energy that arrives when you think no life will ever come again - the early yellow flowering forsythia, for example.
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An enjoyable insight
- By Leigh A on 05-22-23
By: Natalie Goldberg
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Thyme of Death
- China Bayles Mystery, Book 1
- By: Susan Wittig Albert
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
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Overall
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Performance
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When ex-lawyer and herb-shop proprietor China Bayles’s friend Jo dies of an apparent suicide, China looks behind the quaint façade of her new home of Pecan Springs, Texas, and takes a suspicious look at everyone. And though she finds lots of friendly faces, China is sure that one of them hides the heart of a killer.
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Excellent story and excellent narrator
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Buddhaland Brooklyn
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Growing up in a quaint mountainside village in Japan, Seido Oda spent his boyhood fishing in clear mountainside streams and helping his parents run their small inn. At the age of 11, Oda is sent to study with the monks at a nearby Buddhist temple. This peaceful, quiet refuge in the remote mountains of Japan becomes home for the introverted monk - until he approaches his 40th birthday and is ordered by his superior to cross the ocean and open a temple in Brooklyn. Ripped from the isolated, serene life of his homeland temple, Oda receives a shock to his system in New York - a motley crew of American Buddhists with misguided practices.
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engaging listen
- By connie on 07-25-12
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What listeners say about Bella Tuscany
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Jen K
- 05-01-21
Audiobook version muffled
I have enjoyed learning more about the Tuscany area with the author’s books in this series. While not as good as Under the Tuscan Sun, this story still felt like returning to an old friend.
Unfortunately, the audiobook version of this title is not a clear, crisp recording. It honestly sounds like it was recorded over the phone.
The one area of the story I cringed at was when the author was complaining about how many friends and acquaintances wanted to visit. I hope none of them listened to this book. Entertaining CAN be tedious, but perhaps there was a gentler way to make that point.
Overall, worth reading. And have lots of tomatoes and olive oil on hand.
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