A Thousand Days in Tuscany

Marlena de Blasi was a chef, food and wine consultant and restaurant critic before becoming a bestselling travel writer, and her style betrays her culinary passion

Over the past few years I've read just about every English-language travel narrative about Tuscany – and several about Italy – I've come across during my book-buying sprees in charity shops around Britain (call it silly, but I simply love giving a second chance to discarded books...).

Many travelogues about Tuscany have become bestsellers in recent years, and as a travel writer and journalist, I find it helpful (and usually entertaining) to see my homeland through foreign eyes.

My most recent reading is Marlena de Blasi's A Thousand Days in Tuscany, a book that's as much about food and wine as it is about places and people. In her A Thousand Days in Venice (which I haven't read yet), the author wrote about falling in love with a Venetian man, whom she marries. In A Thousand Days in Tuscany, the couple start a new life together in a village farmhouse “on a forgotten patch of earth where Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio collide”.

Marlena de Blasi was a chef, journalist, food and wine consultant and restaurant critic before writing this. And sure enough, it does show! The narrative, that may indeed feel a bit verbose at times, certainly reaches its best when the author is talking of food, or else when she tells about things, places and people as though they were food or wine, evoking their colors, smells and taste.

But one thing I deem worthy of special mention is that for once the recipes she inserts between chapters are for the most part perfectly legit traditional Tuscan recipes, unlike the recipes published by Frances Mayes in her Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, which bear little or no relation to the Tuscan culinary tradition.