Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes is the follow up to her best selling memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun (1997). Mayes invites us to live with her seasonally in Cortona, Italy in and around her beloved home, Bramasole. This book focuses more on the gardens created by Mayes and her husband as well as their travels to many other villages from Venice to Rome in search of house wines, plantings, ironwork, and linens needed to furnish their Italian homestead. The relationships initially formed and revealed to us from Under the Tuscan Sun are further explored in this book. The pace of life here is delicious and delivers a much sought after sense of peace that every American I know seems to search for and yet never find. I loved Under the Tuscan Sun more than this installment of living in Italy because it spoke to the romantic side of me.

It is a dream my husband, Chip, and I share to someday spend part of the year living there. Years ago when we went to Florence, Italy and stayed at the Grand Hotel Minerva that we discovered a surprising sense of "home" that we didn't feel anywhere else. What gives you that difficult to even describe sense of "Yes, this is it. This is where I belong."?