Events

Thursday 9/2  7-8pm An evening with Frances Mayes as she reads from and talks about her newest book Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life       This event is ticketed and space is limited. Please purchase your ticket in advance by calling 919-942-7373 or coming into the store.  Tickets are $35 for a signed hardcover copy of Frances' latest book plus passed hors d’oeuvres of recipes from the book, prepared by Foster’s Market.  Each attendee will have the chance to meet Frances as she signs their book. In this sequel to her New York Times bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, the celebrated “bard of Tuscany” (New York Times) lyrically chronicles her continuing, two-decades-long love affair with Tuscany’s people, art, cuisine, and lifestyle. Frances Mayes offers her readers a deeply personal memoir of her present-day life in Tuscany, encompassing both the changes she has experienced since Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany appeared, and sensuous, evocative reflections on the timeless beauty and vivid pleasures of Italian life. Among the themes Mayes explores are how her experience of Tuscany dramatically expanded when she renovated and became a part-time resident of a thirteenth-century house with a stone roof in the mountains above Cortona, how life in the mountains introduced her to a “wilder” side of Tuscany–and with it a lively engagement with Tuscany’s mountain people. Throughout, she reveals the concrete joys of life in her adopted hill town, with particular attention to life in the piazza, the art of Luca Signorelli (Renaissance painter from Cortona), and the pastoral pleasures of feasting from her garden. Moving always toward a deeper engagement, Mayes writes of Tuscan icons that have become for her storehouses of memory, of crucible moments from which bigger ideas emerged, and of the writing life she has enjoyed in the room where Under the Tuscan Sun began.