Nice. Not much in the way of plot - it is a memoir rather than a novel. A little (maybe a lot) repetitious, but not unbearably so. A bit pretentious, perhaps: she is a university professor - and she coyly never reveals to which of the universities in the San Francisco area she is attached (SF State - it's in her wiki. Did she want me to guess that it was Berkeley?) or what is her discipline (creative writing - gotta love wiki). She is a southern country girl by birth and upbringing, perhaps that accounts for what seems to me a bit of an ego trip.
Part of my enjoyment was pure unadulterated green-eyed envy, I would so love to do what she has done: buy a falling down farmhouse in northern Italy and turn it into a showplace like the ones that some of my friends lived in. Personally, I would choose the Friuli instead of Tuscany, Tuscany is SO cliche! (How's that for a little pretentiousness?)
A minor irritation: it was not always clear when the English word or phrase that followed an Italian word or phrase was a translation and when it was simply another item in the list. Mechanics. And the one word that made me twitch each of the many times I encountered it was "siesta" - in five years, I never heard that word spoken in Italy by an Italian. Over in the Friuli, it was "riposo," a lovely evocative word when considered with its English cognate. "Siesta" is Spanish, "riposo" is the Italian word for exactly the same thing; siesta is unquestionably more commonly understood in the States, but in my experience, native speakers of Spanish and Italian are very defensive of the differences between their languages.
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