Monday, March 19, 2007

Novel: "The Lady in the Palazzo" the third of Marlena De Blasi's Set in Italy

The ANNOTICO Report

 

First it was Venice. Then Tuscany, Now Umbria

 

Marlena's wry wit, clever use of detail, and talent for regaling with stories, with substance rather than saccharine, will capture you. 

 

 

Memoir of a Life Resettled in Italian Romance

The Lady in the Palazzo
At Home in Umbria
By Marlena De Blasi

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 336 pp. $23.95

Philadelphia Inquirer

Reviewed by Scotia W. MacRae

Sunday, March 18, 2007

 

I have never met Marlena De Blasi but I feel as if I know her, because of the way she writes, inviting you into her life, introducing you to her friends, regaling you with stories. The Lady in the Palazzo  is her third memoir of adventures in Italy, picking up from A Thousand Days in Venice  and A Thousand Days in Tuscany.

 

In the first, the chef and food consultant tells of her whirlwind romance with Fernando, a "blueberry-eyed Venetian," and her decision to sell her house and her business to move from the American Midwest to Italy and marry him - against the advice of her concerned adult children - and to make a new life. Fernando leaves his career in a bank and together they conduct custom gastronomic tours for English-speaking guests.

In the second book, they leave Venice for Tuscany, and now, in the third, they have decided to move again, this time to Orvieto in Umbria. "In the six years since Fernando and I have been married," De Blasi writes, "we've lived three in a concrete bunker of a beach house on the verges of the Adriatic Sea, two more in a subtly restructured stable beside a sheepfold in a medieval Tuscan hamlet, and this last year in an Umbrian hill town, in a molding, partly subterranean, once Dominican cloister next to a crumbling castle cum suicide leap."

The book begins with the smell of sausages "perfuming the piazza." It is the Festival of St. Anthony, and food, of course, is a key part of the proceedings. "Like a reliquary in a shrine, there is a wheel of sheep cheese set on a white-draped table and flanked by candles." The shepherd "is perhaps thirty, with eyes green and liquid as just-pressed oil set wide in his heart-shaped face. . . . He rides a Harley but leaves it in a shed on the edges of his land so as not to disturb his sheep." This is the kind of detail that so endears us to De Blasi.

This tale, told around the search for a place to live in Orvieto, tells of the frustrating mysteriousness of doing business in Italy, of the struggle of being the stranger in a new place, of the sensuousness of the food and the surroundings - even the mold on the walls of their temporary lodgings seems intriguing - and most important, of the people they come to know in the process.

At the end there's a party (and recipes). On the table, De Blasi lays handmade quilts and saffron-colored silk velvet. "What do you think?" she asks her husband.

"Well, if only you had trimmed the quilts with the tails of Russian sables and maybe added one more layer of fabric, it might be perfect. This will do, though," he replies.

Americans from Miami Beach (forget your stereotypes, as you must when dealing with De Blasi) join the count and the farmer, the cook and the violinist, the shepherd and the socialite, and the various other characters we have grown to know and enjoy.

Her Italian friends told her it couldn't be done, that these people who had grown up side by side in their well-defined roles would never sit down at the same table together. It's the genius of the American outsider that she makes it all happen as though it were meant to be.

At the heart of this memoir, as of the others, is the continuing love story of a later-in-life romance. De Blasi travels with her Fernando and a friend to Florence. While they wander, she spends the afternoon getting her hair dyed "the color of copper wires" and buying a new outfit.

When she meets her husband at the hotel, he's pale. When she asks what's wrong, he answers: "Today I noticed someone. . . . A woman. I saw her and felt just as I did when I first saw you. . . . I was shocked when I found myself in that same state of . . . excitement or agitation. . . . I kept thinking about this woman. . . . And when we arrived back at the hotel, the first thing I saw was her . . . standing in the lobby with her back to me. . . . and then she turned around, and she was you. You were she."

Wow!

Living (and loving) well really is the best revenge.

Scotia W. MacRae is the former opinion page editor of the Times of Trenton.

 

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/ books/

20070318_Memoir_of_a_life_resettled

_in_Italian_romance.html

 

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