TRAVEL BY AUTHOR

Image from cozyintexas.blogspot.com

As much as I loved our trip to France last summer, between the frustration of air travel these days and my hubby's various health issues, I wasn't sure I ever wanted to leave the country again. John, on the other hand, seems quite gung-ho, and keeps asking me where I would want to go if we took another big trip. Would it be another river cruise, maybe to Budapest or even Viet Nam? How about several weeks in a Tuscan Villa, with lots of little side trips? All were tempting, but the more I thought about our river cruise in southern France, the more I realized that my very favorite parts of that trip were the cities we tacked on at either end -- the cities where we traveled "by author."

Image from stonewallkitchen.com 

Image from rubypr.com

In Paris we followed in the footsteps of several of my favorite cookbook authors, going where they liked to go, eating what they liked to eat, shopping where they liked to shop. What fun! In Marseilles we explored via a fictional tale, The Vintage Caper by Peter Mayle, which made it even more of an adventure, for we had no way of knowing whether the places we sought actually existed or not! Fortunately, most of them did, and we had the very best meal of our entire trip in one of them. Anyhoo, all this got me to thinkin' about other books I have read, of the sort that make one salivate, and one author in particular immediately came to mind -- Marlena de Blasi!

Image from epinions.com

Image from paperbackswap.com

I'm sure I've mentioned her before, and probably gave away one of her books during our "Year of Reading Dangerously." She's the American woman who married a Venetian man after a very brief romance, followed him back to Venice, then to a farmhouse in Tuscany, and finally to a palazzo in the Umbrian hill town of Orvietto, and wrote mesmerizing memoirs about their time in each place. Just for the hell of it I purchased the two you see pictured here, and started reading them again. The first time I think I had library books, but this time I am reading them with hi-liter in hand, paying special attention to places I might like to see, and foods I might like to taste if, by some odd chance, I just happen to find myself in Venice or Orvietto.