Free Every Day in Tuscany by Frances Mayes Page A

happiness and the silent tilt toward peace that this home gives me. Sometimes houses embody not only memory but also a whole sense of the location itself. In the first months I spent here, I had the intuition that since the house was so at home in the landscape, I too would be at home. Living in these rooms, I linked myself to a force field—I am carried by something larger than myself that is at the same time very much myself. Seamlessly, in such a place, you create what in turn creates you.
    Those early impressions about place , I later came to realize, all rested on time . On a metabolic level, don’t you sense that the mystery of time is how it unfolds and folds simultaneously? Time, which devours, also stretches. Time is elastic and brutally rigid. Memory cuts and comes again. It does not know how to downsize, to render redundant, or to press a delete key. Old friends are not replaceable with new friends, early loves are still alive in bright rooms of the mind, and years and miles apart, what your Big Daddy told you is true, blood is thicker than water .

    W HAT AN UNEXPECTED turn when strangers began to seek Bramasole, too. Occasionally, a personal book that goes forth modestly into the world takes on a life of its own and the author can only hang on and travel where she’s carried. After my memoirs, Bramasole mysteriously transformed from the forlorn, abandoned villa, bought on an iron whim, into a symbol. Although it probably seems awful that one’s house turns into a traveler’s destination, that has not been the case. I think those who travel because of a book they’ve read are not ordinary travelers. Also, I think of my writing as letters to friends, so reciprocation seems natural. After the film of Under the Tuscan Sun , a new wave began. Still—romantics, all. With each publication in other countries, new visitors arrive. We’re all amazed to find Estonians, Taiwanese, Tasmanians, Brazilians, et cetera, et cetera, in Cortona. Some officials are pleased that their promotional DVDs sent to tour leaders have been so effective in bringing the far-flung guests to town.
    Other local people get it. They began to joke, somewhat ruefully, that Bramasole is more loved than the grand Medici villas, more visited than Santa Margherita, who lies in her glass coffin at the top of the hill.
    Italians hate to be caught short, and who among them could have predicted that Bramasole ever would become a world magnet? “Imagine,” the owner of the dry-cleaning shop said to Ed. “It took a foreigner—and a woman —to bring this place out.” He handed over the shirts. “Che vergogna!” What an embarrassment.
    After the man died who used to prop a fistful of flowers daily in our shrine, others began to leave sprigs of wildflowers, pinecones, coins, candles, notes, poems, and small gifts such as Christmas ornaments, books, saints’ medallions, bottles of wine. Today I found a stuffed koala bear holding an Australian flag. Seven paintings of Bramasole line the top of my bookcase, all left by strangers. I love these secret links.
    The children born into my family since I acquired Bramasole all inherited emotions similar to those Ed, my daughter, Ashley, and I feel. At two, Willie could say “Bramasole” when shown a picture of an Eden rose, an iron gate, a door knocker. We plant trees with Willie and tell him how high they will be when he’s ten, twenty, forty. My great-niece hides notes under loose bricks, Nancy Mclnerny was here , just as Napoleon’s soldiers wrote on the walls of San Francesco in Arezzo. In certain places, we long to leave a mark on the time continuum. Carlos, my editor’s son, runs up the steps after a year away. “I remember this,” he says, and his face shows that the memory is good. I wish I’d kept a guest book. Hundreds of friends, friends of friends, and family have stayed or lunched or dined here. “How’s Bramasole?” they ask, as though the house were a loved person. On the annoying