Starting with Tuscany

About a year ago I discovered the Book "Under The Tuscan Sun". Iloved that book and the books by Frances Mayes that followed.Since than I had been looking for a new book about Tuscany.Reading "Starting With Tuscany" was very different from "Under The Tuscan Sun" but had the same wonderful characteristics. The writing is beautiful, visual, and interesting. This story is both funny and sad. The author is an architect/artist and thebook was like a very complicated/beautiful painting. Every chapter was captivating. I loved the time I spent with this author.

The best storytellers make you forget you're being told a story. Your conscious thoughts disappear, you are absorbed into the mental picture the author is describing, and it's as if you are the proverbial "fly on the wall," witnessing the events and even feeling as though you are a participant. Giovanna Peel wields such a powerful pen in her evocative, absorbing memoir, Starting With Tuscany, that the story achieves more than just that of a travelogue, where the reader vicariously visits a foreign or previously-untasted locale, and instead remarkably transforms the reader into a relative, a playmate, or a neighbor of Ms. Peel's childhood in Tuscany. The book weaves a narrative of Ms. Peel's first trip back to her native Florence and the surrounding region known as Tuscany since she left it as a young woman. Ms. Peel, who describes herself as the black sheep of her large, prototypically colorful Tuscan family, had moved to Canada where lived in self-imposed exile for thirty years. She begins the trip home with a side trip to Provence with two friends, sort of a warm-up and re-acclimation to European ways before they continue on to Florence, Sienna, and other smaller towns in Tuscany. The trip to Provence fills in some of Ms. Peel's background and foreshadows the fears she has about returning to her native Italy. With her companions in tow, she is the apologetic European, trying to ease their path and explain away different customs and attitudes in order to save her friends discomfort and prevent cultural bias or confusion. In her own mind, she fails miserably, and indeed she seems to derive little pleasure from her sojourn in Provence.Her transition to Italy fares no better, and Ms. Peel's discomfort increases as she mentally tries to apologize for the idiosyncratic ways of her fellow countrymen, while at the same time unwillingly resurrecting a grudging sense of national pride and even a reluctant tolerance or acceptance of the reasons for such ways. When her friends finally leave her alone in Italy, the introspective aspect of the narrative deepens and her enchanting reminiscences fill in the pages of her life. One learns that her father was a German Communist Jew who was persecuted by the Italian government and arrested with regularity. Her mother, with whom Ms. Peel was in constant conflict, had not enough love to go around after caring for her politically-dangerous and amorously-philandering husband and Ms. Peel's older sister. The tenement in which they lived was meager and sparse in furnishing, but lively with eccentric and deliciously strange neighbors, whom Ms. Peel describes in fascinating detail. Formative experiences from Ms. Peel's life include her consignment to an orphanage as a young girl to protect her from her father's tuberculosis; the abduction of her father by German officials and his presumed death at their hands; and the arrival of a girl whom her father hired ostensibly as a servant but in reality as a concubin