One day I would love to travel to places I have read about. I have read books by Mary Moody and her time in the South of France, Amish books set in Pennsylvania, and this has been another one. The idea of a city build on water intrigues.
A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance
He, “the stranger” saw her across the Piazza San Marco and
fell in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later,
he knows immediately that she is the One; it is fate. He knows little English;
and she, a divorced American chef, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena, a
middle-aged Midwestern American woman who had traveled to Italy and is now traveling
through Venice, thought she was satisfied with her life. She is now caught off
guard and thinks she is incapable of intimacy, that her heart has lost its
capacity for romantic love. This was the first meeting, then he goes to visit
her in St. Louis for two weeks. But within months of their first meeting, she gives
up her entire life, quits her job as a chef and partner in a cafe, kisses her
two grown kids good-bye, has sold and packed up her house in St. Louis to move
to Venice to marry Fernando—“the stranger,” as she calls him—and live in that
achingly lovely city in which they met.
Once there, she finds herself sitting in sugar-scented
pasticcerie, strolling through sixteenth-century palazzi, renovating an
apartment “a bunkerlike postwar condominium” on the Lido, as he calls it, overlooking
the seductive Adriatic Sea, and preparing to wed a virtual stranger in an ancient
stone church. Vibrant but vaguely baffled by this bold move, Marlena is
overwhelmed by the sheer foreignness of her new home, its rituals and customs. He
has displeasure at her insistence on remaining a serious cook (in modern Italy
"No one bakes bread or dolci or makes pasta at home," he tells her) But
there are delicious moments when Venice opens up its arms to Marlena. She cooks
an American feast of Mississippi caviar, cornbread, and fried onions for the
locals . . . and takes the tango she learned in the Poughkeepsie middle school
gym to a candlelit trattorĂa near the Rialto Bridge. All the while, she and Fernando,
two disparate souls, build an extraordinary life of passion and possibility.
As this transplanted American learns the hard way about the
peculiarities of Venetian culture, we are treated to an honest, often comic
view of how two middle-aged people, both set in their ways but also set on
being together, build a life – the relationship works. Featuring Marlena’s own
incredible recipes, A Thousand Days in Venice is the enchanting true story of a
woman who opens her heart—and falls in love with both a man and a city. It is
filled with the foods and flavors of Italy and peppered with recipes and
culinary observations. But the main course here is about a woman who falls in
love with both a man and a city, and finally finds the home she didn't know she
was missing. It's a deliciously satisfying meal.
I enjoyed this book far more than the other I had just read, perhaps because it had more of a story than just memoirs.
This looks so good. I will have to see of my library has a copy.
ReplyDeleteThat's where I got mine. Don't you love searching for a book and finding it at the library like you've won a prize!
ReplyDelete