| LifeinItaly.com - Fashion, Travel, News and More. | |  | Travel Books to Umbria | Home » » A Valley in Italy: The Many Seasons of a Villa in Umbria | | | | | | | Description: | | The author of The Slow Train to Milan recounts a year in her life and the lives of her neighbors in San Orsela, a small town in the Umbrian hills of Italy. National ad/promo. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Lisa St Aubin De Teran | | Hardcover:
| 219 pages | | Publisher:
| Harpercollins | | Publication Date:
| 1994-06 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0060168862 | | Package Length:
| 8.4 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.6 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.9 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.9 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 19 reviews |
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- Acceptable | | | $0.98 | Used
- Good | | | $4.90 | Used
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 Multiple refractionsJun 28, 2010
Fascinating autobiographical book of the 'we are artistic, and stumbled on a lost treasure - at low price' type. Dated 1994 - five years after Peter Mayle got to work advertising Provence so successfully.
The author's style is breathless and convoluted - 'My childhood fantasy of musical bedrooms was coming true. Ever since reading Orlando one summer while a reluctant inmate of the children's ward at the South London Hospital for women and children, tied down by drips and tubes to a bed among many beds, I'd longed for a house where I could ramble from room to room, sleeping at random on unknown territory.'
She seems unreliable, omitting such details as money and the nitty gritty of building. This may be due to the genuinely enduring taboo against money, in polite conversation. I suspect in fact she's shrewd about purchasing, judging by occasional remarks - selling their apartment in Venice, for example.
On her name - she was educated in London, but this process was ended, or perhaps postponed, when she ran away at 16 with a Venezuelan described as a 'landowner'; I'd guess Italian links with South America influenced her. She remarried twice by 1994 and I assumed she'd retained the most exotic surname she could (in the manner of Doris Lessing) - it would be amusing if her maiden name was, say, Lisa Smithers. Her husband at the era of this book was a painter six years younger, Robbie with a double-barrelled surname. Fortified by this information I searched on Internet and found an art gallery site which says he's self-taught; his paintings include nudes in a shiny metal-finish effect, rather like that chap with green female torsoes popular in the 1970s, and character studies of moody Italian peasantry, and still lifes. One visualises him upstairs in the mansion, agonising over the high discounts that galleries ask, while his model gets either sunburnt, or chilly and damp, in the roofless studio.
The account is largely of falling in love with the remains of a palatial villa; as far as I've been able to decipher, they found out little about its past. Neither of them seemed to even know where Umbria was. Her description gives the illusion that Italy has no autostrade or agenti di proprietÓ or other modern conveniences, and that her building was like some South American lost monument amid jungle.
She talks about 'restoration' - taken seriously this may involve local-ish bricks, marble, terracotta, timber, glass, lime mortar and plaster - all of which sounds very difficult, now; however there is no detail, and though few people would want an itemised list, it would be nice to know what the 'workmen' got up to.
There are cameos, vignettes, apercus, stories and digressions about her family (beautiful daughter, then 15, who modelled), Italian holidays, food - ham, salami, wine, tomatoes boiled into a paste with basil, panettone. And visits from the locals, banking and the mysteries of Italian employment, corruption and slow mail deliveries, the tobacco crop, etymological bits and pieces. There's disappointingly little about the Second World War (or the First), which events after all were partly responsible for the decay of parts of Italy and the rest of the world.
It's easy to see why some reviewers loved the book - and also why some threw it away in exasperation. There's a reliability issue - she says, as just one example, that sudden Autumn storms left deep pools of water inside the building; they developed a strategy of rolling up carpets and stashing possessions safely, and all would be dry by next day, which seems unlikely.
Her style has a parallel with her own romantic attitude - the reader has to fight through tangled allusions and byways to finally glimpse and explore the half-expected treasure.
Naturally, having been drawn in, many readers must feel triumph in merely having made the effort of the journey, a displacement which indirectly reinforces the power of the words in a way which a more straightforward account wouldn't. It's a matter of opinion whether the final book is as alluring as the ruined building that she found on the hills.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 A low point in the valleyJun 11, 2007
As a lover of all things Italian, I have read many books and found this one to be so annoying that I could barely finish it. The book is less about Italy and becoming enculturated in the author's new home town and more about how preciously eccentric St. Aubin's family is.
If you have little patience for pomposity and narcissism, skip this book.
If you want an example of really poor parenting skills, you might like it.
7 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Pretentious piffle.Apr 02, 2006
What a self-indulgent author. This is possibly the worst book that I have ever read. She is the epitomy of narcissm.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Going native in UmbriaAug 25, 2005
After having read the author's book, "The Hacienda," I was curious to see where life had lead her, and in this book, she has a new family and they have chosen Italy as their home. Most of the book is concerned with the trials of fixing up a run-down villa, while they manage to live with bats and birds swooping over their heads and weather blowing in through the vacant windows. The author and her husband are obviously eccentrics, and have some peculiar habits, such as referring to her teenaged daughter as "the child," driving a two-seater sportscar when they have a family of four (this involves contortions) and wearing outlandish clothes. There are also a lot of tiresome gardening descriptions, which do make one wonder how the garden eventually must have turned out in later years, but add nothing to the story. The real reason to read this book is that St. Aubin de Teran loves the local people and finds a way to be one of them, living life alongside of them and experiencing their sorrows and joys and annual celebrations as a native. No tourist experience can come close, and most people do not have this ability to "go native" with so much fondness for the local characters and their way of life.
13 of 21 found the following review helpful:
Oh, please............Jun 06, 2004
This is probably the most pretentious, irritating book I have ever encountered. The author's "style" is coy and over the top, and her portrayal of Italians is condescending and patronizing. It was hard to believe anything but the bare bones of this story.
Could not force myself to finish. Life is too short to read bad books.
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