In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany

Now with stunning illustrations and color photographs, this newly expanded edition of "In Maremma" recounts David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell's restoration of a dilapidated 1950s farmhouse in southern Tuscany. Beautifully written, witty, and concise, it recounts the process by which they became initiated into a part of Italian life foreigners rarely see. The pleasures of the olive harvest and picking wild asparagus are juxtaposed with the vagaries of political corruption and self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Landscape and weather provide the stuff of reverie, as do the benefits of boredom and the longing for peanut butter. A celebration and exploration of a little-known part of Italy, "In Maremma" is a fond if sometimes critical corrective to other more rapturous portrayals of Tuscany.