Usually travel books aren’t really my thing as I don’t yearn to visit far-flung places and have adventures, I just love being at home in England! But I was actually in Spain when I picked this book up in one of those ‘take a book, leave a book’ places and it caught my eye as the author had travelled to the area I was currently in so I was interested in her view of it. Grab your copy and let’s read it together!
Usually travel books aren’t really my thing as I don’t yearn to visit far-flung places and have adventures, I just love being at home in England! But I was actually in Spain when I picked this book up in one of those ‘take a book, leave a book’ places and it caught my eye as the author had travelled to the area I was currently in so I was interested in her view of it. Grab your copy and let’s read it together!
Hmmm, after suggesting we read the book together I am now discovering that it’s a difficult book to review while I’m reading it, as I don’t want to just be listing the places visited and I’ve also found it’s a book that I am dipping into whilst reading other things, so I have therefore decided to just read the book and then summarise my thoughts and impressions at the end, which I also kind of feel suits the style of the book as well as it is very much a record of the author’s own thoughts and impressions.
So I have now finished it, and I really enjoyed it! I loved the author’s writing as it came across as very natural and like she was just chatting to me about her holiday over a cuppa! It seemed to be more like a record of her rambling thoughts whilst she was travelling, almost like her diary really, rather than a structured travel book you’d take with you if visiting these places or would use to structure a similar holiday yourself, and I liked that style as I found it very readable and it felt less travel-book-ish (as stated earlier, I’m not really a travel book fan) and more like someone’s diary (and I do love reading a diary!). Whilst she does write about the sights she has visited, it is more how the sight made her feel as opposed to the opening times and the best day to visit and the best thing to see there, which again I found fascinating as it was so personal and just as you’d chat to a friend about your experiences of a holiday, and I enjoyed her thoughts about things and her descriptions of the impressions made on her and her personal reasons why she chose to visit a particular sight.
There is also an enormous amount about the food she ate! But I loved her enthusiasm for food, and loved that she seemed to define a place and her memories of it very much by its food, that seems quite a novel approach to me and I think (if I was to travel a lot) I’d also like to learn about a place and build memories of it in that way too, as food has the ability to define so many things about a place, such as its history and ecology and the community spirit and the local people’s pride in their town. I also admired her determination to eat the local food as much as possible, seeking out recommendations of restaurants from locals rather than going to the restaurants advertised in the hotels and guide books, and she was also determined to cook using local food too and often attended cookery lessons in the area if she could or bought a recipe book rather than a guide book about the area, and I love this approach too and the idea of then using the recipe book when back at home to replicate the meals you had in that country and how this would surely evoke far more memories than flicking through a guide book of facts about the area (although obviously I can see a guide book about the area is also useful!).
I think I also found the book resonated with me more than other travel books have done because she rented houses on her travels, wanting to immerse herself in the local community and to shop where the local people shopped and eat where they ate (and also one of the themes of the book was her looking at the concept of home, so staying in houses fitted well with that), or she stayed at hotels, wanting to be comfortable and safe, and her accommodation choices reassured me as I was reading the book as so often a travel book has the author camping or staying in a hostel, which I can see may well be necessary cost-wise and is indeed very admirable but I often find this daunting to read as I know within myself that I most definitely would not want to travel like that as I have no wish to be wet and cold and risk my possessions being stolen! And I find with those usual types of travel books where the author is camping, etc, I spend a lot of my reading time being distracted as I am worrying about how the author will wash their clothes and how they will manage to get a balanced meal, so it was a relief not to be distracted like that with this book!
Some of the places she visited (and she goes to Spain, Portugal, Naples, Italy, Morocco, France, Greece, and Turkey) I enjoyed reading about more than others, but I found her accounts of all very interesting. The area of Antalya in Turkey really blew my mind with all the stunning places she visited there and I had to look up pictures of them, such Yanartas near Cirali (or I think she called it Chimaera) which is an area where gases constantly leak from the magma of the earth and spontaneously ignite, and the large ruined city of Phaselis which looks incredibly detailed and well-preserved, and the beautiful Lycian Coast itself, and if anywhere was to tempt me to travel then those places might just do it! She also visited England and Wales and Scotland in her enthusiasm for famous gardens and plants, and it was particularly fascinating to hear her views of those countries, with her being American (though now living in Italy), particularly of Bath (which I have long wanted to visit) and also of the areas around Leicester (which seemed quite an untouristy place to visit but some of her ancestors are from there) and I also now really fancy visiting Chipping Campden after her descriptions of it. I also chuckled at her observations of quaint English ways and words and pronunciations which of course charmed her, and I laughed at her affectionate joking list of requirements to live in England, ‘I would probably start making cheese and collecting teapots…I’d get heather-hued sweaters, a golden retriever, and a large umbrella, take up knitting’, tee hee!
She is also a prolific reader and I loved all her quotes from books, and several of the books she read during her travels I have now added to my list of books to read, and I loved how sometimes her choices of where to visit was guided by an author living there or a mention of that area in a book, and she often sought out books by local authors when staying in an area. As well as her enthusiasm for food, I also loved her enthusiasm for books!
So, to my surprise, I really enjoyed this book! I’d not heard of this author before, but I see that her book Under The Tuscan Sun is a famous one so I will have to read that next, particularly as she mentioned her home in Tuscany a lot in this book so I already feel like I can picture it a little. And her book Always Italy also sounds good, detailing her journeys to all twenty regions of Italy. I see she has also written novels (yay, much more my thing than travel books!), such as Women In Sunlight, and most recently A Great Marriage, and as I love the way she expressed herself in this book I imagine a novel by her would also be beautifully expressed. And with me loving her love of food, then her cookbooks The Tuscan Sun Cookbook, and Pasta Veloce, sound like they’d be delicious reading! Also one of the books she read whilst travelling and she described in depth really made me want to read this book too, this was Earthly Paradise by Colette so I will also look out for that. And I was reminded of a novel I adored about a holiday in Italy, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim (reviewed on this site), so I am now keen to re-read that too.
