Lady in the Palazzo

Lady in the Palazzo – An Umbrian Love Story is a wonderful tale of exploration in the Italian countryside.

Orvieto, an ancient Italian city rising above the cliffs of Umbria, is among the most dramatic in Europe. It is here that Marlena de Blasi, author of the national best seller A Thousand Days in Venice, sets out to make a home — in the former ballroom of a dilapidated sixteenth-century palazzo — and win over her neighbors, who include artisans, counts, shepherds and a lone violinist. Though wary of a stranger in their midst, they find her passion for the fine arts of cooking and eating irresistible, and together they create a spectacular feast as breathtaking as the city itself.

The ‘Lady in the Palazzo’ novel reminded me a bit of the book Under the Tuscan Sun (not the movie) with the beautiful descriptions of Italy, the renovation process of her ballroom and the wonderful local recipes that I cannot wait to try for myself. Who can resist brown sugar gelato with caramelized blood oranges or umbrichelli with olivada (Google pics of these dishes. They look so delicious!)?

Although her focus in ‘Lady in the Palazzo’ is mainly on the destination and cooking, there are a lot of intimate local stories and history woven into her words. Yes, I appreciate all of the cooking but there was one section about Etruscan tear jars that I will remember for a very long time.

“Every woman, every man, every child had one. You can see them in the Faina museum up in town, but they look like this,” she says, getting up to reach for a vial-shaped terra-cotta vase that holds a single dried rosebud and stands on a shelf in front of a small, silver-framed photo of her mother. “When an Etruscan cried, he held the vase up to his eye, collecting the tears in it. Tears fall from the soul, they believed, from the melting of the soul, and so to lose tears was to lose one’s soul itself. Then they would crush violets or rose petals and scent the tears, make a kind of perfume of them, use the potion to anoint the people they loved. Thus giving up their soul to love.”

These beautiful sections scattered throughout the book make this story an immersive experience to the reader and I cannot wait to explore her other novels in the near future! Who else wants to take a trip to Italy now?

Click here to read it for yourself!