Notes from an Italian Garden

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Summary: Notes from an Italian Garden
Review: A journalist observes the seasons in a garden in Canale, Etruria, and recounts the tribulations and satisfactions of creating it. Readers who fantasize about getting a sweet little cottage set in romantic countryside, planting a garden there, and becoming part of a traditional community-that is, practically everyone who isn't actually doing so at the moment-have created an insatiable demand for stories like A Year in Provence and In Tuscany to color their daydreams. Marble's cheerful garden chronicle sticks to the established formulas of the genre, and revolves around the adventures of a sophisticated but sympathetic couple with some unspecified source of income who go off in search of their spiritual home in some not-yet-fashionable patch of countryside. They build a touchingly modest house with thick stone walls and a tile roof for a reassuringly low price, and adjust awkwardly to the lack of American comforts. The grudgingly productive farmland is gradually coaxed into luxuriant, decorative bloom, and there is the assortment of entertaining eccentrics and local yokels (who use dynamite to dig an orchard and wreak havoc with the water pipes) close by in the background. This particular specimen of the myth offers plenty of incidental pleasures: Marble's prose is witty and reasonably charming, and she presents some sharp, precise observations on semitropical gardening (including a wonderfully detailed chapter on seed germination). Yet the little town of Canale never quite comes into focus either as a landscape or a society. Portraits of the indigenous population, including Massimo (a bulldozer driver with a mysterious past) and DeDe (a plant wizard with a sleazy husband) have a creepily condescending tone, as though it never occurred to the author that they might tell their stories for themselves, or that the perceptions of the people who have worked the land for generations might be as valid and interesting as a newcomer's. Now that would be a refreshing variation on the theme. Pleasant fodder for armchair travelers and gardeners, if not appreciably different from the many other works of its kind.

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Summary: Notes from an Italian Garden
Review: A truly delightful book about Italians, human behavior, history, travel, and gardening. The author paints a picture with her words, captures your imagination, and makes you chuckle at the unique Italian way of living. From buying land and building a house to sinister business deals, to marriage contracting, gardening fetes and disasters, this book will charm and delight you on many different levels. I enjoyed this book so much more than "Under the Tuscan Sun." This is truly a gem of a book.

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Summary: Delightful
Review: A truly delightful book about Italians, human behavior, history, travel, and gardening. The author paints a picture with her words, captures your imagination, and makes you chuckle at the unique Italian way of living. From buying land and building a house to sinister business deals, to marriage contracting, gardening fetes and disasters, this book will charm and delight you on many different levels. I enjoyed this book so much more than "Under the Tuscan Sun." This is truly a gem of a book.

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Summary: Enchanting!
Review: I love to travel but I have never added to the sales of those memoirs of hapless outsiders who renovate a barn or farmhouse in Provence, Tuscany or Umbria. No matter how well-written, most are self-conscious narratives recycling the same ingredients: coping, making friends--and enemies--and eating well. Joan Marble's book is refreshingly different. She and her husband built rather than renovated, and in Etruria, off the touristic track; they nurtured unforgiving soil producing delights for the table. But it is the delight of armchair gardening that makes this book such a good read. There is humor and pathos in how this couple celebrate life. Highly recommended.

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Summary: A Work of Great Beauty
Review: Joan Marble has created a work of great beauty in "Notes from an Italian Garden." She has a profound knowledge of gardening and the countryside of central Italy, of Italian history and the Italians of today, and all this is reflected in her book. From my own years in Italy I can testify to the book's accuracy; far beyond that, it reflects a rare sort of felicity and civility. I want to believe that in future centuries people will come back to this book to read how two Americans led such pleasant and productive lives in the Italy of our time.

Rating:
Summary: A Work of Great Beauty
Review: Joan Marble has created a work of great beauty in "Notes from an Italian Garden." She has a profound knowledge of gardening and the countryside of central Italy, of Italian history and the Italians of today, and all this is reflected in her book. From my own years in Italy I can testify to the book's accuracy; far beyond that, it reflects a rare sort of felicity and civility. I want to believe that in future centuries people will come back to this book to read how two Americans led such pleasant and productive lives in the Italy of our time.