When she was 24, she finally got there, on a trip to Bologna with her first husband. Mayes was first what she calls “propelled” to travel to Italy after taking art history courses at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and the University of Florida.

“I didn’t really know anybody who had been to Europe,” Mayes tells me. This was the 1950s in Georgia, and few people in Mayes’s circle were traveling to Italy. Mayes was first introduced to Italy as a child, transported there through the screen- movies like Roman Holiday and Three Coins in the Fountain, which featured wide shots of cobblestoned streets and glowing stars like Audrey Hepburn and Jean Peters.

But how much control does an artist have, once the art has left her hands? Yes, she knows she bears some responsibility for this crush of travelers, of course she does.

People kept reading and kept coming to Tuscany. In the 24 years following her blockbuster, Mayes has written more books, a number of them about Tuscany: Bella Tuscany (1999), In Tuscany(2000), Bringing Tuscany Home (2004), Every Day in Tuscany (2011), The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (2012). This book just happened to find readers and to my surprise, I’ve been flying on its coattails ever since.” “Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. “You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be,” Mayes wrote of Under the Tuscan Sun on her blog. In 2003, that same book became a movie of the same name, starring Diane Lane and Sandra Oh and eventually grossing $58 million worldwide. The purchase and renovation of that home became the subject of a 1996 book, and that book was translated into 54 languages and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two and a half years. 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. And though Frances Mayes had been to Italy before, it was in Tuscany where she fell in love. There was an ad in the back of an issue for a house rental, and there was an open summer. It started with the New York Review of Books, this whole Tuscany thing.

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