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A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance
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About A Thousand Days In Venice: An Unexpected Romance
Product Description Fernando first sees Marlena across the Piazza San Marco and falls 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; she, a divorced American chef traveling through Italy, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thought she was done with romantic love, incapable of intimacy. Yet within months of their first meeting, she has quit her job, sold her house in St. Louis, kissed her two grown sons good-bye, and moved to Venice to marry “the stranger,” as she calls Fernando. This deliciously satisfying memoir is filled with the foods and flavors of Italy and peppered with culinary observations and recipes. But the main course here is an enchanting true story about a woman who falls in love with both a man and a city, and finally finds the home she didn’t even know she was missing. Review "An irresistible grown-up love story." ―USA Today "Better than a romance novel, it's the real thing." ―New Orleans Times-Picayune "The story sounds impossibly romantic . . . [But] this moonstruck tale is absolutely true . . . It is, surprisingly, a story with a happy ending―reached, as real-life happy endings must be, not by fiat but by accommodation." ―The Boston Globe "A little cioppino of a book, a tasty stew with equal parts travel adn food and romance, spiced up with goodly amounts of fantasy-come-true." ―The Seattle Post-Intelligencer "The 'happily-ever-after' is riveting and the recipes are mouthwatering just to read." ―The Philadelphia Inquirer About the Author An American chef and food and wine journalist, Marlena de Blasi has written five memoirs, a novel, and two books about the regional foods of Italy. She lives with her husband in the Umbrian hilltown of Orvieto. Her work has been translated into twenty-six languages. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Signora, the Telephone Is for You The small room is filled with German tourists, a few English, and a table or two of locals. It's November 6, 1993, and I arrived in Venice that morning, two friends in tow. We speak quietly together, sipping Amarone. Time passes and the room empties, but I notice that one table, the one farthest away from us, remains occupied. I feel the gentle, noninvasive stare of one of the four men who sit there. I turn my shoulders in, toward my wine, never really looking at the man. Soon the gentlemen go off, and we three are alone in the place. A few minutes pass before a waiter comes by to say there is a telephone call for me. We have yet to announce our arrival to friends, and even if someone knew we were in Venice, they couldn't possibly know we were lunching at Vino Vino. I tell the waiter he's mistaken. "No, signora. Il telefono F per Lei," he insists. "Pronto," I say into the old, orange wall telephone that smells of smoke and men's cologne. "Pronto. Is it possible for you to meet me tomorrow at the same time? It's very important for me," says a deep, deliberate, Italian voice I'd never heard before. In the short silence that follows it somehow clicks that he is one of the men who'd left the restaurant just moments before. Though I've understood fairly well what he has said, I can't respond in Italian. I mumble some linguistic fusion like, "No, grazie. I don't even know who you are," thinking that I really like his voice. The next day we decide to return to Vino Vino because of its convenience to our hotel. I don't think about the man with the beautiful voice. But he's there, and this time he's without his colleagues and looking more than a little like Peter Sellers. We smile. I go off to sit with my friends, and he, seeming not quite to know how to approach us, turns and goes out the door. A few beats pass before the same waiter, now feeling a part of something quite grand, comes to me, eyes direct: "Signora, il telefono F per Lei." There ensues a repeat of yesterday's scene. I go to the phone, and the beautiful voice s
