Frances Mayes

Frances Mayes is an American poet and author whose Under the Tuscan Sun — a memoir about restoring an Italian farmhouse — defined a genre of books about the pleasures of the good life in the Mediterranean.

Frances Mayes was a poet and creative writing professor in San Francisco when, in 1990, she and her partner Ed bought a ruined farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside near Cortona and began the years of restoration that became Under the Tuscan Sun (1996). The book — a memoir structured around seasons spent in Italy, the work of renovation, the discovery of local food and markets and wine and people — arrived at a moment when American readers were ready to fantasize about abandoning their over-scheduled lives for simplicity and beauty.

The book spawned a subgenre: A Year in Provence (Peter Mayle), Eat Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert), and dozens of subsequent Italy/France/Spain memoirs followed its template. What distinguished Mayes’s original from most of its imitators was the specificity of the food writing — she includes actual recipes — and the genuine engagement with the renovation process and the Tuscan landscape. She writes as a poet attentive to sensory experience, and the prose has a quality of deliberate pleasure that matches its subject.

Under the Tuscan Sun was adapted as a film with Diane Lane in 2003. Mayes continued writing about Italy in Bella Tuscany (1999) and Every Day in Tuscany (2010), and has written travel essays, a novel, and a book about the American South. The original memoir remains the essential book and one of the defining texts of what might be called aspirational travel writing — the genre in which the destination is as much a way of life as a place.

The Poet’s Eye

What distinguishes Mayes’s writing from the flood of imitators her success inspired is the sensibility of the poet she was long before she became a memoirist. Trained and published as a poet and a professor of creative writing, she brings to her prose an attentiveness to sensory detail, rhythm, and image that elevates the ordinary business of renovation, gardening, cooking, and daily life into something lyrical. A meal, a wall being replastered, the light falling across a Tuscan hillside, the smell of a market in Cortona — these are rendered with a precision and pleasure that reflect years of disciplined attention to language. This poetic quality is the secret of the book’s enduring appeal; where lesser entries in the genre simply catalogue charming experiences, Mayes makes the reader feel the texture of a life lived slowly and sensuously. Her inclusion of actual recipes, her loving descriptions of food and wine, and her evocation of the seasonal rhythms of the Italian countryside all spring from the same source: a writer’s conviction that the way to honour experience is to observe it closely and render it beautifully. The result is prose that itself enacts the deliberate, attentive pleasure that is the book’s true subject.

Founder of a Genre

Mayes’s true significance lies in how thoroughly Under the Tuscan Sun established and popularised an entire category of writing, the aspirational relocation memoir in which a person from the busy modern world remakes their life in a beautiful, slower-paced foreign place. Though Peter Mayle’s Provence books had begun to chart this territory, it was Mayes who crystallised its essential American form, fusing the fantasy of escape with the concrete pleasures of food, landscape, renovation, and community. The book arrived at exactly the right cultural moment, speaking to readers weary of over-scheduled, materialistic lives and hungry for a vision of simplicity, beauty, and reinvention, and its enormous success spawned countless imitations set in Italy, France, Spain, and beyond. The genre it helped define has proved remarkably durable, and its influence extends well beyond books into film, lifestyle media, and the broader cultural fantasy of buying a ruin abroad and restoring both the house and oneself. That so many subsequent memoirs follow her template, structuring themselves around seasons, renovation, local characters, and culinary discovery, is a measure of how completely Mayes shaped the form. She did not merely write a bestseller; she created a way of writing about the good life that others continue to follow.

A Lasting Love Affair with Italy

Far from being a one-book phenomenon, Mayes built a sustained literary career out of her deep and enduring engagement with Italy, returning to her beloved adopted region across multiple volumes that deepen and extend the original. Bella Tuscany and Every Day in Tuscany continued the story of her life at Bramasole, the Cortona farmhouse, exploring further seasons, journeys, meals, and friendships, while related works gathered her travels through other parts of Italy and her reflections on the art of living well. Her connection to Tuscany became not a passing infatuation but a decades-long relationship that shaped her identity as a writer and a person, and her work collectively amounts to one of the most thorough and affectionate portraits of expatriate life in Italy in contemporary letters. Beyond the Italian books she has also written fiction and returned imaginatively to her native American South, demonstrating a range that her Tuscan fame sometimes obscures. Yet it is her Italy that readers cherish, and her ongoing chronicle of life there has made Bramasole and Cortona almost as familiar to her devoted readership as their own homes. Mayes endures as the foremost literary celebrant of the Tuscan good life.

Where to Start with Mayes

The essential starting point is Under the Tuscan Sun, the memoir that made her famous and remains the fullest and most beloved expression of her gifts, structured around the seasons of restoring a Tuscan farmhouse and discovering the food, landscape, and people of the region. Readers should come to it for its sensory pleasures and its lyrical evocation of place rather than for dramatic incident, and they may find it rewarding to keep the recipes in mind for their own kitchens. Those enchanted by it can continue the Tuscan story in Bella Tuscany and Every Day in Tuscany, which offer more of the same affectionate, seasonal chronicle of life at Bramasole. Readers curious about her range beyond Italy can explore her fiction and her memoir of the American South, Under Magnolia, which applies her observant, sensory style to the landscape of her origins. The film adaptation starring Diane Lane offers a looser, more romanticised version of the story for those who enjoy the books. But the original memoir is the indispensable place to begin, the book that defined both Mayes’s career and an entire genre.