Queen Bee Of Tuscany

"Quite simply one of the best books of the year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at eighteen and went to live in Egypt. There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, and humiliated pashas in horse races. In 1867 she moved to Florence, Italy where she spent the remaining sixty years of her life writing a series of books and hosting a colorful miscellany of friends and neighbors, from Mark Twain to Bernard Berenson, at Poggio Gherardo, her house in the hills above the city. Eventually she became the acknowledged doyenne of the Anglo-Florentine colony, as it was known. Yet she was also immersed in the rural life of Tuscany: An avid agriculturalist, she closely supervised the farms on her estate and the sharecroppers who worked them, often pitching in on grape and olive harvests. Spirited, erudite, and supremely well-connected, Ross was one of the most dynamic women of her day. Her life offers a fascinating window on fascinating times, from the Risorgimento to the rise of fascism. Encompassing all this rich history, Queen Bee of Tuscany is a panoramic portrait of an age, a family, and our evolving love affair with Tuscany. A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013

A portrait of the Victorian-era writer and Anglo-Florentine colony doyenne includes coverage of her work for the London Times, achievements as an avid agriculturalist and relationships with such contemporaries as Mark Twain and Bernard Berenson.

Lonely Planet’s Florence & Tuscany is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Travel the roads of Val d’Orcia, sample Chianti and explore the Uffizi’s collections; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Florence & Tuscany and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet’s Florence & Tuscany Travel Guide: Up-to-date information - all businesses were rechecked before publication to ensure they are still open after 2020’s COVID-19 outbreak NEW top experiences feature - a visually inspiring collection of Florence & Tuscany’s best experiences and where to have them What's NEW feature taps into cultural trends and helps you find fresh ideas and cool new areas NEW pull-out, passport-size 'Just Landed' card with wi-fi, ATM and transport info - all you need for a smooth journey from airport to hotel NEW Accommodation feature gathers all the information you need to plan your accommodation Improved planning tools for family travellers - where to go, how to save money, plus fun stuff just for kids Colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sightseeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - history, people, music, landscapes, wildlife, cuisine, politics Over 51 maps Covers Florence, Siena & Central Tuscany, Southern Tuscany, Central Coast & Elba, Northwestern Tuscany, Eastern Tuscany and more The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet’s Florence & Tuscany, our most comprehensive guide to Florence & Tuscany, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less travelled. Looking for just the highlights? Check out Pocket Florence & Tuscany, a handy-sized guide focused on the can't-miss sights for a quick trip. Looking for more extensive coverage? Check out Lonely Planet’s Italy for a comprehensive look at all the country has to offer. About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we've printed over 145 million guidebooks and phrasebooks for 120 languages, and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You'll also find our content online, and in mobile apps, videos, 14 languages, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more, enabling you to explore every day. 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' – New York Times 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' – Fairfax Media (Australia)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved memoir of self-discovery set against the spectacular Tuscan countryside that inspired the major motion picture starring Diane Lane—now in a twentieth-anniversary edition featuring a new afterword “This beautifully written memoir about taking chances, living in Italy, loving a house and, always, the pleasures of food, would make a perfect gift for a loved one. But it’s so delicious, read it first yourself.”—USA Today For more Frances Mayes, including a tour of her now iconic Cortona home, Bramasole, watch PBS’s Dream of Italy: Tuscan Sun Special! More than twenty years ago, Frances Mayes—widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer—introduced readers to a wondrous new world when she bought and restored an abandoned Tuscan villa called Bramasole. Under the Tuscan Sun inspired generations to embark on their own journeys—whether that be flying to a foreign country in search of themselves, savoring one of the book’s dozens of delicious seasonal recipes, or simply being transported by Mayes’s signature evocative, sensory language. Now with a new afterword from Frances Mayes, the twentieth-anniversary edition of Under the Tuscan Sun revisits the book’s most popular characters.

A diary entry, begun by a wife and finished by a husband; a map of London, its streets bearing the names of forgotten lives; biographies of siblings, and of spouses; a poem which gives life to long-dead voices from the archives. All these feature in this volume as examples of ‘writing lives together’: British life writing which has been collaboratively authored and/or joins together the lives of multiple subjects. The contributions to this book range over published and unpublished material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. The book closes with essays by contemporary, practising biographers, Daisy Hay and Laurel Brake, who explain their decisions to move away from the single subject in writing the lives of figures from the Romantic and Victorian periods. We conclude with the reflections and work of a contemporary poet, Kathleen Bell, writing on James Watt (1736–1819) and his family, in a ghostly collaboration with the archives. Taken as a whole, the collection offers distinctive new readings of collaboration in theory and practice, reflecting on the many ways in which lives might be written together: across gender boundaries, across time, across genre. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

This book explores all aspects of Brophy's literary career, alongside contributions on animal rights, vegetarianism, anti-vivisectionism, humanism, feminism and sexual politics, not only celebrating Brophy's eclectic achievements but fully reflecting them.

A. J. Degulio loved the idea of a visit to the Old Country—until her family decided to stay. Now it's 1972 and she's turning fourteen in a crumbling castle on a hill in Tuscany, wishing she were back in Idaho with her beloved dog, Sailor. In Italy, her fair complexion and blonde hair make her stick out like a vanilla wafer in a box of chocolate biscotti, and she's so lonely her best friend is a nun from the local convent. What's worse, her grandma's losing her marbles and Mama's going crazy over Uncle Nick's ugly blue villa, which she can see from every window. The challenges of roots and relatives are nothing new to A. J. but factor in language, culture shock, and a bad case of homesickness, and A. J.'s going to need more than the famous Degulio sense of humor to survive. It will take a catastrophe—and a few wise words from a friend—for A. J. to understand that sometimes the only thing you can change is your perspective.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Tuscany is a landscape whose cultural construction is complicated and multi-layered. It is this very complexity that this book seeks to untangle. By revealing hidden histories, we learn how food, landscape and architecture are intertwined, as well as the extent to which Italian design and contemporary consumption patterns form a legacy that draws upon the Romantic longings of a century before. In the process, this book reveals the extent to which Tuscany has been constructed by Anglos — and what has been distorted, idealized and even overlooked in the process.

Dealing with the interconnections between music and the written word, this volume brings into focus an updated range of analytical and interpretative approaches which transcend the domain of formalist paradigms and the purist assumption of music’s non-referentiality. Grouped into three thematic sections, these fifteen essays by Italian, British and American scholars shed light on a phenomenological network embracing different historical, socio-cultural and genre contexts and a variety of theoretical concepts, such as intermediality, the soundscape notion, and musicalisation. At one end of the spectrum, music emerges as a driving cultural force, an agent cooperating with signifying and communication processes and an element functionally woven into the discursive fabric of the literary work. The authors also provide case studies of the fruitful musico-literary dialogue by taking into account the seminal role of composers, singer-songwriters, and performers. From another standpoint, the music-in-literature and literature-in-music dynamics are explored through the syntax of hybridisations, transcoding experiments, and iconic analogies.