A Thousand Days in Venice (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
by Marlena de Blasi
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marlena de BlasiEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-06-03
ISBN: 0345457641
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of A Thousand Days in Venice (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
Book Review: A sumptuous, sensual feast
Summary: 5 Stars
Let me take you to a city by the Adriatic Sea, of stone bridges and gondolas and floating palazzos. Prepare to fall in love...
"Exiting the now empty train, I tug my suitcase onto the platform...and stride through the tumult of the station, amidst vendors peddling water taxis and hotels, travlers in the anguishes of arrival and departure. The doors are open and I step out into wet, rosy light, onto a sweep of wide shallow steps. Shimmering water glints from the canal below. I don't know where to put my eyes. The Venice of myth is real, rolled out before me. In straw hats and striped shirts, the gondolieri are sculptures of themselves fixed on the sterns of glossy black boats under a round yellow sun. The Bridge of the Barefoot is off to the left and the sweet facade of the church of San Simeone Piccolo hails from across the water. All of Venice is tattered, resewn, achingly lovely, and like an enchantress, she disarms me, makes off with the very breath of me."
Fernando catches a glimpse of Marlena's profile while she is in Venice for an assignment. It is love at half-sight for the Venetian banker, and when Marlena, a food writer and chef, comes back a year later, Fernando works up the courage to talk to her. Eighteen days after that first conversation, he follows her back to America, they fall in love, and she decides to leave everything behind to live with him in Venice. And that's just the beginning of the story.
If I wasn't already in love with the idea of Venice, this book is the one that would have made me long to jump onto the next vaporetto to be whisked away to the enchanting, perplexing, and sometimes comical existence Marlena describes in lush, descriptive prose. Because it is about Venice, even something as simple as taking a walk is lovely, but with Marlena's rich detail, the experience becomes magical.
As she falls in love with Fernando, so do we fall in love with the Venice of which she writes, weaving stories of her life among Italian strangers, the friends she makes, the mysteries of local customs, the hidden treasures of a fabled city only an inhabitant could know, and not least of all is THE FOOD. Make sure you have dish of something on hand because reading this book will make you famished. Should you feel inspired to cook, recipes are included at the back.
"...I make a better for enormous golden squash blossoms and stuffing for a veal breast with pistachios and pancetta and Parmesan and sage. Plumped and tied up in cottong string, I braised the veal in butter and white wine and I let it rest and cool in its pan juices. There wil be an iced soup of roasted yelllow tomatoes adorned with a pair of anise-grilled praws to beging, a wedge of Taleggio---ripe, runny---white figs, and meringues from Maggion at the finish. We dine slowly."
Likewise, savor this story. I cannot tell you how difficult it was to pick just a few choice quotes to share since this book is heaping with delicious passage after delicious passage. I meant to just flip through and pick out some quotes but I couldn't resist its lure - I had to devour every morsel of it again, despite countless rereadings.
The fact that it is all true, that Marlena did run away to Venice to be with her lover makes this book one of the most romantic I have ever read. In the book she questions if, at middle age, she and Fernando are too old to be so impetuous. Their story, however, demonstrates that one is never too old to follow one's heart, to be brave, to risk all, to love as fully and with abandon as these two have. I met Marlena and Fernando at a book signing two years ago, and I assure you, not only are they still together (17+ years later), but they do seem to still be very much in love. They put much younger couples to shame.
A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance by Marlena de Blasi is a sumptuous, sensual feast of a book that celebrates life, love, and food. An exceptional travel memoir!
Summary of A Thousand Days in Venice (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
He saw her across the Piazza San Marco and fell in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later, he knows it is fate. He knows little English; and she, a divorced American chef, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thinks she is incapable of intimacy, that her heart has lost its capacity for romantic love. But within months of their first meeting, she has packed up her house in St. Louis to marry Fernando??the stranger,? as she calls him?and live in that achingly lovely city in which they met.
Vibrant but vaguely baffled by this bold move, Marlena is overwhelmed by the sheer foreignness of her new home, its rituals and customs. But there are delicious moments when Venice opens up its arms to Marlena. She cooks an American feast of Mississippi caviar, cornbread, and fried onions for the locals . . . and takes the tango she learned in the Poughkeepsie middle school gym to a candlelit trattoría near the Rialto Bridge. All the while, she and Fernando, two disparate souls, build an extraordinary life of passion and possibility.
Featuring Marlena?s own incredible recipes, A Thousand Days in Venice is the enchanting true story of a woman who opens her heart?and falls in love with both a man and a city.
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