In Tuscany

"That's one of the things I love best about Italy," I say. "You can so suddenly be dropped behind the time curtain. But the people are totally of this moment so you don't have a feeling of being a time-traveler." I have a gift for her in my bag, but I am waiting.

"I could smell meat sauce cooking all afternoon from the kitchen below. Someone down the street was playing the piano and the leaves seemed to turn overnight. There was a man carrying a wild rabbit over his shoulder," she remembers. "He looked like a figure in a medieval psalter!" She smiles radiantly.

Now I'm remembering my autumns in Tuscany -- pasta with lepre (wild hare) sauce, the aromas of wild mushrooms sizzling in freshly pressed olive oil, the jar of rice infused by an earthy slice of truffle a friend found in the mountains. Also olive-wood fires in the evening and early morning walks on a Roman road in the damp chestnut forest.

Since I have owned and restored Bramasole, a formerly abandoned house in the Tuscan countryside, I have spent 11 summers, several winter semester breaks, a spring, and two falls in that exquisite countryside. Seasons there are not subtle. Spring is riotously spring. Summer is hot as a blast furnace. Each season brings its beauties and seductions. Thrills. Who could choose a favorite? The long fall is a strong contender, from September, when summer breaks and golden light starts to sift over the valleys, through December, when a few roses still glow in the wintry light.

"I thought you romanticized Italy," my friend continues. "You're a poet so I thought you made it all seem soft focus and nice for me. But you didn't! I felt at home there from the minute I stepped into that big piazza in Siena. No words can do justice to that space." She looks at me almost accusingly. "It's even more divine than you said."

I'm not sure if I've been kicked or complimented. I take my present from my bookbag, a copy of my new book, wrapped in Florentine paper. In Tuscany has 150 photos by Bob Krist, his sublime landscapes, markets, piazza life, and faces I particularly love. Since she is just back, and dazzled by Tuscany, I want to give her this gift. I wrote chapters about how intensely Italians celebrate food and seasons; about the pleasures of off-season travel. I included recipes from favorite meals I've eaten at friends' houses. My husband, Ed, wrote about the pleasures of the olive harvest. But my friend looks only at the photo of the famously beautiful piazza in her Siena, with the shadow of a tower falling across the bricks like a sundial. "I had a glass of wine and watched that shadow," she says slowly and to herself. She pauses. "I will always have this place with me."

Driving home from her house, I'm taking in the coastal California hills with afternoon fog roiling over the crests, the evergreens fringing the ridge, the reservoir where two deer are drinking: a landscape to make the heart flip.

We journey through the world and along the way the heart mysteriously expands. A poppy-covered slope or a curve of beach at dawn or an isolated town silhouetted against the sky can become intimately ours. The bells ringing at night, a waitress who throws back her head in a wild laugh, the touch of a saint's robe, the lemon-scent at a shuttered window, the dinner when an owl flies close over your head, the woman in a doorway knitting a red sock. The purest joy of travel is finding those openings your heart can move through.

--Frances Mayes