The Rapture of Reconstruction

Bene! She’s back.

Frances Mayes, author of the 1996 runaway bestseller “Under the Tuscan Sun,” encores with “Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy,” a memoir chronicling further adventures evolving around restoration of a once-abandoned 200-year-old villa in Cortona, Italy.

Three weeks into a 26-city book promotion tour, Mayes was still perky just hours before her publisher was hosting a dinner in her honor at Valentino in Santa Monica, where owner Piero Selvaggio planned a menu using recipes from her books. She hoped they’d “turn out right.”

Food is one of Mayes’ passions, as well as one of the reasons to read her books, which are liberally laced with descriptions of memorable Italian meals and recipes for specialties Italiano.

She loves the role food plays in the lives of Italians--”They just pull the guest into the home, so much hospitality and generosity around the table.” And she marvels that “at the height of the tourist season you’ll see a sign at your favorite trattoria saying, ‘Closed for vacation.’ The fact that they place their own lives before money just thrills me.”

In “Bella Tuscany” (Broadway Books, 1999), she strays far beyond Cortona--perhaps too far for those who expect all Tuscany, all the time--taking readers along on journeys to Venice and Sicily, to a wedding in California and a funeral in Minnesota.

Still, the joy of reading Mayes is in the writing. She doesn’t write formulaic travel books, citing hotel prices and museum hours. With her, there’s always “some kind of inner journey going on along with the outer journey.”

The journey that changed her life began nine years ago when, after “a long marriage and a horrid divorce,” Mayes indulged her midlife fantasy and invested her life savings in a crumbling 13-room country house at Cortona. It had charm, but no central heat, antiquated plumbing and bountiful scorpions.

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Together, she and significant other Ed Kleinschmidt set about lovingly restoring the house and its five acres. As they did, she kept a diary, which was to become “Under the Tuscan Sun.”

She sent that book proposal off to a New York agent, “who kept it for five months and then said no.” Undeterred, Mayes offered it to Chronicle Books, which gambled on a first printing of 5,000. It didn’t exactly bomb, but it was no sensation.

Then Broadway Books published the paperback and soon, it seemed, everyone you knew was reading it. Like Peter Mayle before her with “A Year in Provence,” Mayes was suddenly a celebrity. About 1.3 million copies have been sold worldwide.

It seems she’d struck a chord with “People who like to travel, like Italy, like food, like houses. Women particularly responded to someone taking off after a divorce, starting over.” And, she adds, “I hope the writing had something to do with it.”

It did. Mayes writes with grace and humor about Cortona, where she and Kleinschmidt spend summers and Christmas vacations. She describes the joys of decompressing from life in San Francisco and “burrito-and-a-movie nights, or order-out-for-Chinese nights, 17-messages-on-the-answering-machine nights” to the human pace of life in rural Italy where “the silence of the country sounds loud.”

She observes in “Bella Tuscany”: “I came to Italy expecting adventure. What I never anticipated is the absolute sweet joy of everyday life--la dolce vita.”

Even the Gardening Lovingly Recounted

Those who don’t give a fig about gardening should be forewarned that she writes lovingly, and lengthily, about every olive tree, every lilac bush in the garden of her villa, Bramasole, which she sees as “a place where I can give memory a location and season in which to remain alive.” She may have oversold Cortona, considering an onslaught of 31 straight days of house guests so intent on soaking up la dolce vita that they manage to ignore the dinner dishes.

Unlike Mayle, who presented the rural French as quaint, cute and laughable, Mayes describes with real affection her Cortonan neighbors and friends. As she says, “They weren’t put there for my amusement.” She didn’t identify with Mayles’ books “because he wasn’t doing any of the work [of restoring his house]. He was always eating cheese and drinking wine. And where was his wife, who was kind of a shadowy presence? Maybe she was doing all the work.”

Some have accused Mayle of single-handedly bringing a tsunami of tourists to Provence, turning the ancient hillside towns into make-believe hamlets all but swathed in Provencal print fabric.

Has Mayes, perchance, done similar to Tuscany?

Tuscany was “discovered” long before she landed, she replies--”Seven million Germans come every year.” Yes, there are “touristy” villages such as San Giormagno and Pienza, but most of the villages haven’t yet been “tarted up.” Although flocks of tourists now come to Cortona, she insists, “the local people seem really thrilled.”

Indeed, she’s been made an honorary citizen.

“I had to give a 10-minute speech in Italian,” she says. “I practiced for two weeks. The mayor said they were thrilled someone from America understood the pride they took in their town.”

One side benefit from restoring Bramasole was getting to know the locals, not only the plumber and the plasterer, but also the neighbors “who started bringing us things from their gardens, bottles of wine, invitations to their church festas. They’re very giving people.”

And she’s enjoyed seeing events in America through their eyes. They shrugged off the Clinton sex scandal, reasoning that “at least he doesn’t take bribes.” And “they don’t understand the kind of violence we live with. People there leave their doors unlocked, leave their keys in the car, look you directly in the face when you walk down the street.”

Readers Often Make Unscheduled Visits

Mayes didn’t go to Cortona to find a house; she found the house and it happened to be there. And then she wrote about that house. And then . . .

“People who’ve read the book are making pilgrimages to the house.” Most just walk by and wave, but one day “we had the front door open and this man walked into the hall with a camcorder.” Others have left small treasures at the little shrine by the roadside--a pretty rock, a peacock feather. Some have left notes--”I’m staying in town. Would you like to have dinner?”

She says, “There are people I barely know calling from the train station, saying, ‘I think I’ll come for a few days.’ ” In time she reasoned, “I don’t see them at home. Why should I see them here? Now we have an answering machine. That helps.”

When she bought Bramasole, she recalls, “My family thought I was nuts. Now they think I was just brilliant. They come all the time.”

Sharing adventures in Italy has given “a great new focus” to her relationship with her two sisters, with whom conversation had always revolved around caring for their invalid mother. She has found, too, “You can get in ruts with friends. Something like this can reinvigorate friendships.”

And, while many couples end up divorcing after enduring the trauma of remodeling a house, Mayes and Kleinschmidt, an English professor at Santa Clara University, ended up marrying. She writes, “Ed and I have spent 10-hour days decalcifying tile floors, 10-hour days stripping doors, but facing your true love over an open septic tank may be one of those true tests.”

Last year both took sabbaticals, and they spent six months in Cortona. In the fall, “It was like a different place almost. Everyone went mad for the mushroom season and the pig season, when they make the sausages, and, of course, it was the grape harvest . . . it was another world.”

The success of “Under the Tuscan Sun” gave Mayes the luxury of a hiatus from teaching creative writing at San Francisco State this year.

Her Next Novel Will Be Set in Georgia

“I’ve been teaching for 23 years, and I must say I don’t miss it.” Will she teach again? “I think so,” she admits.

She’s now writing a novel set in Georgia, where she grew up--and where she absorbed her soft Southern speech. She’d like to write more about Cortona and the villa. “I think I could write about Italy the rest of my life.” But not a cookbook. “I can’t stand writing all those quarter-teaspoons down.”

For those who might be tempted, there are not villas aplenty waiting to be snapped up by Americans.

“The local people know of a few,” Mayes says, “and they don’t like to tell anybody about them. Most of those old farmhouses were abandoned or sold off for nothing after World War II. I think the Italians regret having sold off so many. But they don’t want to live in those drafty old houses.”

While Mayes rhapsodizes poetic about Italy and its charms, she is no Pollyanna. She writes, “It’s the end of the ugly century [in Italy] too,” with trucks spewing pollution on freeways, craftsmen succumbing to commercialism. But, in general, people have “just managed the century better than we have. Everyday life in Tuscany is good.”

Still, she doubts she’ll ever live there full time.

“I’m real tied to San Francisco--my friends, my literary life. And my daughter lives there.

“Ed would, in a minute. If we sold our wine and olive oil, we figure we could make $400 a year.”

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Beverly Beyette can be reached by e-mail at Beverly.Beyette@latimes.com.