Frances Mayes, author of “Under the Tuscan Sun,” on Eight-Hour Dinner Parties and Italian Town Life
Frances Mayes has lived in Tuscany for over 25 years in a small town visited by people from all over the world because of her #1 New York Times bestseller “Under the Tuscan Sun.”
One day when she was restoring her house her neighbor came over and invited her to dinner. “Knowing Italian dinners take eight hours” and she didn’t know the language, she and her husband declined, anticipating that it would be awkward as a result. This guy “full of hospitality” exclaimed, “well, you eat don’t you!?”
Frances has gotten used to eight-hour dinners. One such dinner she and her husband attended was held by a couple celebrating their two sons’ communion. There were about ten different antipasto dishes and then several secondi courses. “At the moment [she] thought the food was winding down, the cooks brought in a tray — so big it could hold a human — on which was a huge roasted cow thigh.” Her husband started singing a song “he didn’t know” with three other Italians, and then they were the first to leave after eight hours. On the way home, her husband remarked how he “hopes they are around when the sons marry.”
When she held her first dinner parties in Italy, something that she at first was taken aback by was how she would meticulously set the table for eight guests and prepare all the food accordingly, and then when the Italian guests arrived, they would naturally bring along other friends. Horrified, Frances would then have to scramble to accommodate. But she has grown to really like that and sometimes does it herself when she is invited somewhere. Italians are so accommodating, “let’s just pull up chairs, va bene-style.” She used to think that “the ideal dinner party number was six, but Italians think 25 is the perfect number.” They rotate throughout the evening to different places, so in the end “you talk to lots of people.”
And there is “never a sense of guilt. Unlike in America, never does anyone remark ‘oh, that looks fattening,’ ‘oh, this dessert is sinful,’ ‘oh, I shouldn’t eat that.’ Food is part of the culture and part of socializing.
In the market, she asked a sales lady if some pears are local and the woman exclaimed “no, mi dispiace! I’m so sorry, but they are from [a town five miles away]!” Tuscans eat seasonally. Asparagus is available in the spring. Some special beans are only in season for two weeks of the year. “They are foragers, so the mayor might be off picking olives,” another townsperson “might be looking for wild lettuce or asparagus.”
“Churches are like living rooms. Everyone comes, and as the priest is talking at the pulpit, people talk amongst themselves, socializing with their friends. So it is a very communal experience, and priests and nuns are the butt of like every joke.”
“The piazza is where you meet everyone.” Her “little town is slow to embrace the internet, because rather than emailing, you’ll see everyone you want to talk to in the piazza along with those you’d rather not.”
Learning a language inevitably has its embarrassing moments. One of her old writer friends was a “purist” when it came to food and went to, not the deli, but a little butcher shop and asked for lamb “senza preservativo.” The guy behind the counter laughed, because she had asked him for — not lamb without preservatives — but “lamb without a condom.”
When the “Under the Tuscan Sun” movie was being filmed, 27 large vans arrived into town…“well, the Italians had nothing to worry about, since they’re used to barbarian hoards.”
Hannibal defeated the Romans at the bottom of a hill near the town, and the townspeople “might converse arguing whether he came in from the right or from the middle in such a way that you’d expect to see Hannibal walk in at any moment.”
In Italy, there is “no frantic, catching up with time” type of feeling that you get in America. Instead, “there’s a sense that Italians are flowing in the river of time.”
Frances’ Tuscany house is named Bramasole. “There’s something nice about naming a house; it acquires a cozy identity of its own.” Her doors and windows are “always open. Butterflies flutter in through the door and out the window. The neighborhood cats run through. This opened, freed up my mind as well, for writing and for being more outgoing and engaged.”
Frances was a poet and teacher at San Francisco State College before she took on writing full-time. When she submitted the “Under the Tuscan Sun” book, the editors thought it would sell like her poetry — “aka not at all.” When the book took off in terms of sales, the editor called her to comment on “how surprised he is and how it must be because of the cover”…which “has a nice picture of Tuscany.”
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