Maybe some folks just don't get it. For Mayes, 59, a poet and creative writing professor at San Francisco State University, the rustic simplicity and charm of the house called Bramasole (Italian for "yearning for the sun")—and the nine years she spent restoring it—are the very heart of a spirit-reviving adventure that has turned her into one of America's most popular authors. With more than a million copies sold, Under the Tuscan Sun remains a bestseller, and this year's sequel, Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, is quickly catching up, with more than a quarter-million copies sold.
A mélange of travel writing, autobiography and Italian cookbook (both books contain her adaptations of authentic Tuscan recipes), Mayes's memoirs have a magnetic appeal to readers who yearn for a simpler life. "I like the way she sees things," says Sonya Bruggemann, a Dutch reader who recently made the pilgrimage to Mayes's neck of the woods. "She has inspired me to dream about [doing this] myself one day." It's a yearning that even may have touched a reader named Bill Clinton, who made a foray from the safety of the White House during his impeachment trial in January to pick up a copy of Tuscan Sun at a nearby bookstore. "It was fun to think he was reading it," Mayes says with a laugh. "Maybe he wanted to look like he had nothing to think about but Italy!"
Not that renovating a 250-year-old villa is a walk in the Rose Garden. Still, in 1989, Mayes—who began vacationing in Italy in the early '60s—found the old villa entrancing. "It was totally overgrown," she recalls of the 13-room stone house in rural Cortona, Italy, 60 miles southeast of Florence, which had been abandoned by its owners 30 years earlier. "But it looked like a dream house. Not in terms of amenities and land, but like a house in a dream."
One year later, the recently divorced Mayes decided to sink her life savings into Bramasole and asked then-boyfriend Ed Kleinschmidt, a creative writing professor at Santa Clara University, to help begin renovations. Spending their summers and winter breaks in Cortona, the couple (neither of whom spoke much Italian) rebuilt the house—at the same time forging relationships with the neighbors they met and the builders they hired. The dust in the air seemed to agree with Mayes's writing. Her journal grew into a lyrical celebration of both Tuscany and the transformations their time there inspired. "It's a chronicle of love," says Ed, who took Mayes's last name when they married in 1998. "We were falling in love with the house and falling in love with each other."
The people of Cortona are equally smitten. "She was inspired to enter the soul of Tuscan people," Mayor Ilio Pasqui wrote last year, when he declared her an honorary citizen. "Love was born, and from this a poetry."
Mayes says her childhood in Fitzgerald, Ga., 81 miles northwest of Macon, prepared her for Tuscany's languid way of life. "Italy has that wonderful Southern tradition of hospitality," she says. "It's very warm and friendly." The youngest of three girls born to the late Garbert Mayes, who managed the family's cotton mill, and Frankye, a homemaker who died this year, Frances earned a degree in English literature at the University of Florida, where she also met her first husband, Frank King, an aspiring computer scientist. The couple had a daughter, Ashley, in 1964, then moved to California, where Mayes earned a master's in creative writing at San Francisco State. She joined the faculty soon after, but she and King drifted apart and divorced in 1988. Mayes met Kleinschmidt, now 47, through academic connections in the '80s, and they went together on her fateful house-hunting trip.
These days the couple are collaborating on a photo book about Italy. And though they live in California for much of the year, their spirits have taken root in Italy. "Everyone who comes here gets a mental turnaround," says Mayes. "By the time they leave they say, 'I want to change my life.'
Peter Ames Carlin
Simon Perry in Cortona and Karen Grigsby Bates in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Simon Perry,
- Karen Grigsby Bates.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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