A Thousand Days in Venice (Ballantine Reader's Circle) - Softcover

De Blasi, Marlena

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345457641 ISBN 13: 9780345457646

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2003

Synopsis

He saw her across the Piazza San Marco and fell 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; and she, a divorced American chef, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thinks she is incapable of intimacy, that her heart has lost its capacity for romantic love. But within months of their first meeting, she has packed up her house in St. Louis to marry Fernando—“the stranger,” as she calls him—and live in that achingly lovely city in which they met.

Vibrant but vaguely baffled by this bold move, Marlena is overwhelmed by the sheer foreignness of her new home, its rituals and customs. But there are delicious moments when Venice opens up its arms to Marlena. She cooks an American feast of Mississippi caviar, cornbread, and fried onions for the locals . . . and takes the tango she learned in the Poughkeepsie middle school gym to a candlelit trattoría near the Rialto Bridge. All the while, she and Fernando, two disparate souls, build an extraordinary life of passion and possibility.

Featuring Marlena’s own incredible recipes, A Thousand Days in Venice is the enchanting true story of a woman who opens her heart—and falls in love with both a man and a city.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

“An irresistible grown-up love story.”
—USA Today


“AN APPEALING TALE OF A TRUE ROMANCE AND A SECOND CHANCE . . . A Thousand Days in Venice is a little cioppino of a book, a tasty stew with equal parts travel and food and romance, spiced up with goodly amounts of fantasy-come-true.”
—The Seattle Post Intelligencer


“Move over, Bridges of Madison County. Here comes real romance— with recipes, yet. . . . A beautifully written memoir. . . . The ‘happily ever after’ is riveting and the recipes are mouthwatering just to read.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author:

Marlena de Blasi has been a chef, a journalist, a food and wine consultant, and a restaurant critic. She is the author of two cookbooks, Regional Foods of Northern Italy (a James Beard Foundation Award finalist) and Regional Foods of Southern Italy. She and her husband, Fernando, now direct gastronomic tours through Tuscany and Umbria.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0345457641
• ISBN 13: 9780345457646
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304