President’s Lecture Series

Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, will speak April 20

Frances Mayes, poet and author of the best-selling memoirs Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy and Bella Tuscany, will present a lecture titled “Finding the Rhythm of a Memoir” April 20, 2000, at 7 p.m. Her lecture is part of the President’s Lecture Series.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Poet Frances Mayes, author of the best-selling memoir Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy and the sequel, Bella Tuscany, will present a lecture titled “Finding the Rhythm of a Memoir” on Thursday, April 20, 2000, at 7 p.m. in Salomon Center for Teaching, located on The College Green. The presentation, part of the President’s Lecture Series, is open to the public without charge.

Until 1996, Mayes, a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, was known primarily for her poetry. But the 1996 publication of Under the Tuscan Sun, which combined literary portraits of food, landscape, neighbors and gardens with reflections on two cultures – American and Italian – brought Mayes commercial success. The book, called by one reviewer “part travelogue, part epicurean journal, and part This Old Villa,” recounts the idyllic summers she and husband Ed Kleinschmidt spent in a two-century-old 17-room villa they purchased and restored in Cortona, southeast of Florence.

This lecture is presented in cooperation with the Brown University Bookstore.