I’ve been meaning for some time to start regularly writing about travel books at The Mother of All Trips. I’ve got a stack of them in my office, some sent to me, some that I’ve picked up myself. No matter where I’m going, reading is always an important part of my preparations, both for practical advice and information and also for inspiration.

Recently I’ve been reading Every Day in Tuscany by Frances Mayes, the type of book that makes up an essential part of my travel library. Although it doesn’t offer advice or tips for traveling with children, in fact offers little in the way of nuts-and-bolts advice of any kind, it readies me for travel by opening up my imagination, which is just as important.

Mayes wrote the enormously popular Under the Tuscan Sun about buying and restoring a house named Bramasole in Cortona, Italy. Now, twenty years after her purchase of the house, she revisits some of the same territory with a very different eye and attitude. No longer consumed with rebuilding the garden or furnishing her new domain, indeed no longer new to expatriate life, Every Day in Tuscany is a less heady (if no less romantic) ode to Mayes’ adopted country.

Mayes is a diffuse and eclectic writer who tends to follow her own whims. There are moments reading this book when I wish that she would perhaps be a bit more disciplined and organized in her approach. But the lack of structure does make this a great book to dip in an out of. One day I might read about how to construct and use an outdoor bread oven and the next travel along as Mayes pursue the tale of Cortona’s native son, the painter Luca Signorelli. There are recipes, lists of old-fashioned Italian names, and even some darker moments when Mayes actually contemplates giving up her entire Italian enterprise.

Some of my favorite moments in the book, not surprisingly, are when Mayes writes about her grandson Willie, who was six at the time of writing (the book is dedicated to him). Willie first visited Cortona when he was six weeks old, and Mayes writes about how instantly comfortable he seemed there. She describes her pleasure in sharing Italian food with him, in introducing him to new tastes, textures, shapes and colors. And she clearly understands the value of traveling with a young child:

I never love Italy more than when Willie is here. Everything good about living here magnifies. Everything just ordinary takes on the aura of his interest. Which theologian said that religion should feel like a larger freedom? I like the idea and connect it with love as well. Having this boy in my life offers many large gifts and the best is an expansive sense of largesse. Maybe freedom comes when you can feel your best self way out in the open.

And what’s also vicariously enjoyable is that although she writes of homey things like making meals with her grandson, there is plenty of glamor in Mayes’ life – she is after all a famous writer, living in Tuscany. Some of this comes out as she describes a meal shared with Robert Redford and talks also of meeting writers like Muriel Spark. But mostly she writes of her Italian friends, of loving meals and parties both at Bramasole and at a second cottage she and her husband have purchased somewhere up in the hills nearby (no doubt mostly to escape the prying eyes of tourists, since her house is now on their bus routes). She also writes gorgeously about her peregrinations around Italy, trips to Portofino and Assisi and Urbino and Rome.

In fact, I was struck reading the book how much Mayes is driven by wanderlust. She is forever contemplating selling the house, moving elsewhere in Italy or the world. I love her ability to visit a place and imagine an entire new life for herself. It is that ability I think that qualifies one to become an expatriate in the first place. For me it’s a pleasure to go along for that ride with her, trailing along in the wake of her lush language:

Italy is an immortal playground. Does any country come close to its sustained, heady concoction of joys–serene landscape and magnificent art and layered history and savory cuisine and glorious music and welcoming people? So many ands. All in an elongated peninsula slashed down the middle with mountains, packed and stacked with dialects, great cooks, the Renaissance, hill towns, evocative cinema, ruins, castle, mosaics, villas, church bells, beaches, on an on.

Sometimes the best travel books offer nothing more than an invitation to dive into a place. This is one of those.

One of my favorite travel websites is Wanderlust and Lipstick, which recently sponsored the terrific WanderWomen Write contest. Although I didn’t win a trip to Vietnam, I am proud to share that my essay “The Return” was a finalist in the Family Fun category.

I hope you enjoy this story about my first visit to Florence as a mother. And be sure to take a look at some of the other winning entries including the grand prize essay “Building a Family in Kenya” by JoAnna Haugen. Armchair travel at its best! Happy reading to all.

I was recently invited to write about what it was like to live as an expat for Italiakids.com. This excellent website contains a wealth of information for international families living in (or thinking about living in) Italy. In my essay describe the experience of moving to a completely alien place where I didn’t speak the language, including what happened when I had to take a public bus to school by myself for the first time.

I hope you enjoy A Year in Florence. And if you’d like to read more about my travels in Italy, see this page.

The web site Travel Savvy Mom (one of my favorites both for its travel recommendations and the wonderful writing you’ll find there) is running a terrific series of posts this week in honor of Mother’s Day called “Before We Were Moms.” The idea is for the writers there to share stories of how their mothers shaped them as travelers. I did that myself (coincidentally) last week on the anniversary of my mother’s death and for today, I really wanted to find a photograph that came from my travels with my mother. Preferably one that had her in it.

Here’s the thing though: my mom didn’t take pictures! I don’t think she even owned a camera, ever. Now she was an artist who was continually sketching, but she didn’t sketch herself and actually didn’t draw me and my sister that often either. So my choices are very limited.

What I did find was this picture of me (on the left) and my sister Sheila taken from the biggest trip we took with our mother – nine months in Italy. My mom was studying art at Studio Art Centers International and so Sheila and I spent a good part of each day hanging around the classrooms and studios playing after school.

We were bored one day, and so one of the students took it upon herself to teach us about textiles. One thing led to another, and Sheila and I ended up batiking and sewing the puppets in the picture, which were actually hung up as part of the students’ end-of-semester show. I still have mine, wrapped in tissue paper and put away in my keepsake trunk. It is named Stephanie, in honor of the young woman who helped in its creation. You can see her below between me and my sister. I think the puppet is not a bad likeness actually. On the back of this photo my mother wrote: “Kids, Stephanie, & Marchese – Art Show SACI 1980 Studio.” I have no idea now who the Marchese was, but she is certainly elegant in a jolie-laide sort of way.

I’ll never forget walking through the huge wooden door into the art school (which at that time was right up the street from the Piazza San Lorenzo and also an easy walk from the Duomo) and inhaling that scent of turpentine and gesso and age. Someone would be smoking and lounging on the ratty sofas, always. The Rolling Stones played on cassette. My mother, thin and distracted, sat at her easel and painted her pain on huge canvases while everyone around her kept a respectful distance. And Sheila and I danced and sang and pretended we were princesses and went to the corner bar for ice cream and made puppets. Sometimes I think I learned everything I now know about creativity and madness and angst and joy in those nine months.

The picture above, taken somewhere in Florence by my sister on goodness-knows-whose camera, is the only one I have of my mom and me on our journey. I didn’t really feel like it deserved to be the main attraction in this post, since it’s so blurry and random and off-center, but then again, maybe that’s actually appropriate.

For Photo Friday at Delicious Baby. Please visit to see all of the other great photos. And don’t forget to trot over to Travel Savvy Mom for a look-see too!

This picture is for Photo Friday at Delicious Baby. Please stop by there and check out the other wonderful posts. And please also visit the Passports with Purpose page. For a ten dollar donation to Heifer International, you can be registered to win a Flip video camera or other great prizes.

Below are my Florence travel tips. Were I to visit with my children today I would (among many other things):

• Take them the Boboli Gardens, which are wild and tame at the same time, the enchanting paths covered with arbors of branches and leaves, now a statue, now a fountain, now an old stone wall to discover at the end. When we brought Tommy there he shrieked and ran down the paths that crunched deliciously beneath his feet, lost himself in a maze, and discovered the ruins of the botanical gardens. An ancient fountain nearby looked like it had sprung from the very earth. Algae trailed over the lip making the cold water emerald and irresistible to his little hands.
• Climb with them to the Piazzale Michelangelo, a hillside terrace where one can survey the entire city under the benevolent gaze of a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David. The view from there encompasses all of Florence, the Arno down its center. The skyline is full of famous landmarks: the campanile and cupola of the Duomo, the Palazzzo Vecchio, the green dome of the synagogue. To the left are olive groves that lead up to the huge medieval walls of the Forte di Belvedere. Even if one knows that amber, sienna, umber, and olive green are the colors of the Tuscan landscape, to see the soft sides of Florentine buildings, one red, one gold, one whitewashed and aged to a dull gray, is to truly understand these origins and how shoddy their reproduction is elsewhere.

 
• Go for ice cream at Vivoli and then watch them chase pigeons in the square in front of Santa Croce.

Florence is a place of both beauty and sadness for me. My mother, who died ten years ago next spring, loved it but was both mentally and physically unwell during the nine months we lived there together. Much of my practical philosophy about traveling with children was learned by observing her and then doing the opposite. She wasn’t much of a planner and our travel narrative was one of closed currency exchanges, nearly missed connections, and rides in third-class train cars where the seats were wooden benches. I have an especially vivid memory of running down a crowded platform as she frantically searched for our train car; just as she hopped on board, the bungee cord flew off the small metal rack I was pulling and sleeping bags and luggage tumbled to the ground. Breathless and frantic, I started tossing the items to her, hauling myself up the steps just as the train started to move.

But I also remember my overwhelming joy the first time I experienced the pink and green confection that it the Duomo, the taste of roasted chicken skin flavored with rosemary and olive oil, peering at the silky water of the Arno from the Ponte San Trinita, staring through the branches of an olive tree at a deep springtime sky, and standing in awe in front of the Primavera by Botticelli. It was my mother who showed me the pleasure of discovering the beauty and newness of an unfamiliar place; my appetite for travel was permanently whetted.

I was unable to bring myself to return to Florence until I could go with my own child, and I was so glad that I did. I had thought I would want to spend a lot of time in contemplation, and Matt and Becky did encourage me to wander the city where I visited my childhood haunts and thought about my mother. But eventually on all of these walks I would reach a point where I no longer wanted be alone with my memories but with the three of them in happy conversation.

And so I would head back to “our” little neighborhood in the Oltrarno (walking distance from the Duomo, but on the other side of the river). On one evening there was a brown-bearded man wearing a red velvet cap and playing the guitar up next to the old city wall that was adjacent to our apartment. My glance in his direction brought my eyes to the corner of the building closest to the gate where I realized that there was a faint fresco of the Virgin and Child in an indented shrine. I felt a sudden stab of grief for my mother, alone amidst all this beauty, very aware of her loneliness, and unable to really take comfort in me or my sister because the burden of caring for us fell solely on her shoulders.

Minutes later, when I walked past the kitchen window I saw Becky and Matt leaning over Tommy at the kitchen table; their faces looked like all the paintings I had been seeing of the adoration of Christ. When I walked in, I realized that they were feeding Tommy clementine slices and he was crowing about “eating juice.” It was as if my mother was telling me that the time for grief was past. Being in Florence with my child had exorcised the lingering demons of her sadness. I had fallen in love with Italy, with Florence, with our small traveling family, and with our adventure. Is it any wonder I am dreaming of it?