That Summer in Sicily: A Love Story, by Marlena de Blasi (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008)
While traveling one summer, author Marlena de Blasi and her husband accidentally stumble upon villa Donnafugata, a “somewhat ruined castle in the mountains of Sicily.” Their plan to stay one night becomes two, then three, and so on until they find the days passing and themselves moving with the rhythms of people and place. Curious from the beginning about the castle and its inhabitants, especially Tosca, the beautiful patroness of the villa, de Blasi is eventually trusted with Tosca’s story of love, crime, place, and refuge, a story passed on to readers, along with the sensuous daily “rituals of a humble, well-lived life,” in That Summer in Sicily.
Hollyhocks don’t grow in the desert. Yet hundreds and hundreds of their red satin blossoms line a wide stone path to a flung iron gate. I know this is a dream. Through the gate lie astonishing sweeping gardens. There are roses. Ivory and white and the color of burnt cream, they climb trellises and sprawl in beds, spill and ramble and entwine. Boxwood parterres, hedges of yew, clumps of lavender, fat and tall, and white foxgloves nod among white dahlias, among white peonies. I know that the castle and the roses and the hollyhocks are sun-stroke illusions. The hallucination will pass. We’ll climb back in the car and drive away from this madness of silence and mockery. But while the hallucination endures I want to look over there, where gnarled trunks of wisteria and jasmine and grapevines tent a pergola, make a dark, shady room from whose depths laughter comes. How many days has it been since I’ve heard laughter? Even my own? I walk toward the pergola, and stand at the opening to see a clutch of women in long black dresses who sit ‘round an oilclothed table. Tremulous light insists among the leaves, spangles the women’s fingers flurrying over a heap of yellow beans. – from That Summer in Sicily, by Marlena de Blasi
Publisher’s Website