David Leavitt

In Maremma

Life and a House in Southern Tuscany

With stunning illustrations and color photographs, this expanded edition of In Maremma recounts the restoration of a dilapidated 1950s farmhouse in southern Tuscany.

Beautifully written, witty, and concise, it recounts the process by which they became initiated into a part of Italian life foreigners rarely see. The pleasures of the olive harvest and picking wild asparagus are juxtaposed with the vagaries of political corruption and self–perpetuating bureaucracy. Landscape and weather provide the stuff of reverie, as do the benefits of boredom and the longing for peanut butter. A celebration and exploration of a little–known part of Italy, In Maremma is a fond if sometimes critical corrective to other more rapturous portrayals of Tuscany.