In Maremma: A Life and a House in Southern Tuscany

A whole subset of travel memoirs is now devoted to the theme of restoring old houses in Europe, thanks to Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes. While most authors use the home as a vehicle to examine the surrounding culture, in In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany, David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell tilt their measure decidedly on the side of home decor. "Nothing tells you more about a people than their houses," they write, as they set out to "construct a past based on [their] own private notions of comfort, upon which [they] could glance with pleasure in some hypothetical future". While initially daunted at restoring a country house in bureaucracy-plagued Italy, the two dive in with gusto when they find Podere Fiume (River Farm) in Maremma, a little known part of Tuscany.