I live there now half of the year for about 1,000 reasons, but the most profound: I open the door and say aloud, “I’m home”. I travelled to Italy originally to see the art and architecture. Who can explain how you can sense a metabolic connection with a foreign place, when you have no genes, no ties? Colpo di fulmine – “love at first sight”. What inspired that love and what fuels it today?įrom the first trip until the last one, I experienced exactly the same sensations – the feeling of being at home. Q: You’ve written that you’re profoundly in love with Italy. I recently caught up with Mayes to delve deeper into her love of Italy and to ask her advice about unlocking meaningful travel experiences that forge connections with people of other cultures. While the timing might have seemed unfortunate at first, the book is an opportunity to show solidarity for Mayes’ beloved Italy and its 20 diverse and uniquely beautiful regions. The book came out this past spring when the country was in lockdown as the global epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic. The book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two and a half years, was made into a feature film starring Diane Lane and has led Mayes to write a series of subsequent love letters to Italy that have inspired many of her readers to dream of relocating to the bel paese.įor Mayes’ latest project, Always Italy that I co-authored, she and I spent nearly two years zigzagging across every Italian region only to find that many years after we both relocated here, there was still so much to discover about our adopted homeland. Her 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun tells the story of how she fell in love with a rundown 200-year-old villa outside Cortona, and how she painstakingly restored it alongside her Italian neighbours. In the last 24 years, no other writer has likely lured more travellers to Italy than Frances Mayes.

Frances and ed mayes