Review: Italy, A Love Story
Karin Finell -- October 13, 2005
Italy, A Love Story. Women Write about the Italian Experience. Edited by Camille Cusumano. You tell me your friends are going to Italy this fall? Hurry to your local bookstore and buy this book before their plane takes off.
Travelers will love the book. It will put them into the mood of Italy, of its cuisine, its scents, its ancient cobbled streets, its incomparable history and works of art, and not to forget, its darkly handsome men who charm the pretty teenager as well as the well-kept matron in her Golden Years.
Italy, indeed, a love story. The anthology is the brainchild of Camille Cusumano, who is pays homage to her four grandparents with this book. The stories are compiled with a view to variety; travels take the reader from Milan to the tip of the boot, Sicily, interweaving mythology with history and present day life. We learn from one writer about the curing aspect of Italy's scents, where she found an antidote to the aftermath of chemo treatments and cancer. The overwhelming aromas from jasmine to fields of blooming broom, to leather and tobacco shops, to the many scents of coffee and espresso, all of this combines to obliterate the memory of illness, all this gives way to a newly found harmony and optimism under the Tuscan skies.
In "Stonework," Santa Barbaran, Fran Davis, takes us to Umbria and its present day mysteries interwoven with its Etruscan past. We marvel at the Giotto frescoes in the cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi, and feel the "pull of time beneath our feet" along with the author. I wished I too could go to sleep in a stone farmhouse and listen to the rain "beat in silence" on roof and wooden shutters. I longed to tread the paths leading to yet another fortress town, then stopping in a small cafe for cappuccino. Yes, Italy, a love story.
Space does not permit to mention each of these marvelous stories. I would like to thank the many authors for giving me a little bit of the heart of Italy.