It started with the New York Review of Books, this whole Tuscany thing. This was decades ago. There was an ad in the back of an issue for a house rental, and there was an open summer. Then, there was a vacation. And though Frances Mayes had been to Italy before, it was in Tuscany where she fell in love.

Years later, in 1990, Mayes purchased her own home in Cortona, Tuscany, a 200-year-old farmhouse on five acres called Bramasole: “from bramare, to yearn for, and sole, sun: something that yearns for the sun,” she later wrote.