Writer and poet Frances Mayes lives the kind of life most of us can only dream about. Wandering through Italy, she and her husband, Ed, came upon a villa in the Tuscan town of Cortona. They bought and restored the villa, an effort she chronicled in her deeply charming best-seller Under the Tuscan Sun, which was later made into a film starring Diane Lane.

Subsequent books like Bella Tuscany, Every Day in Tuscany and The Tuscan Sun Cookbook turned her from a chronicler into an expert and eventually into a celebrity. There have been other books as well, but now there’s See You in the Piazza, a diary of her extended travels in her adopted homeland with her husband.