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.