Year In Italy

Imagine living in Italy for one full year. This was always the dream and promise Ilene and Gary made to each other. This story is an invitation to witness the magic of Italy through the eyes of two new Italian citizens. Listen to their own authentic voices, in alternating chapter format, sharing their story, raw emotions, laughter, triumphs, challenges, and experiences in this intimate format.

Julia Volpe’s Italian dream has turned into a nightmare. Still living with her ex, Luca, a year after they’ve broken up, desperate to sell the dilapidated B&B that was meant to be their future, Jules knows she needs to leave. There are just two problems. Her passport has expired and she’s broke. Not quite ready to ask her parents for help – at the ripe old age of twenty-seven – Jules decides to head as far away from Luca as she can to work on an olive farm until she has enough money to pay for her passport and a ticket back home.

Kate is living the dream with her gorgeous boyfriend, Alessandro, in his native city, but the reality is sometimes a little less romantic than she’d hoped. Every day in her new home is a fight against leaking pipes, her cantankerous landlord and her less-than-perfect grasp of the Italian lingo. All around her there is talk of weddings, but when a secret from her past is thrust out into the open, Kate must fight to prove to Alessandro’s formidable family that she truly is Italian marriage material.

When Michelle Damiani dreamed of living in Italy, she imagined her family as it was in Virginia - her husband filling every moment with work, her teenage son experimenting with sarcasm, her daughter smiling at the scent of lilacs, her baby-cheeked son methodically clicking Legos together, and herself hovering over the happiness of them all - only surrounded by ancient cobblestone alleys and the sound of ringing Italian. What she didn't know was how Italy would work to change them all.

A Year in the World is vintage Frances Mayes, a celebration of the allure of travel, of serendipitous pleasures found in unlikely locales, of memory woven into the present, and of a joyous sense of quest. An ideal travel companion, Frances Mayes brings to the page the curiosity of an intrepid explorer, remarkable insights into the wonder of the everyday, and a compelling narrative style that entertains as it informs.

It’s the summer of 1942, and life is starting to become more and more dangerous for Italian Jews like the Russo family. In their quiet village, Antonio Gallo and Gabriella Russo lived as most youths did - unaware of the hope lost to their parents’ generation, but believing in a future for themselves.