Customer Rating:  
Summary: Cheesy, saccharine, sickly and artificial - and peopled by cardboard cut-outs.
Comment: By the time I got to the end of this I could have cheerfully murdered these two smug ratbags. Everything was so perfect, everybody was so kind, everybody loved each other, nothing bad or nasty ever happened (Oh, I'm sorry, there was the time they were woken by a barking dog) and all that bloody food! I was quite queasy after the tenth description of these gluttons just stuffing themselves day after day with pate, salami, pasta, rabbit, chicken, sausages, wild boar, pork, lamb, cherries, strawberries, potatoes, pheasant, prosciutto, figs, chestnuts, guinea fowl, ten different cheeses, wine, grappa, coffee, tarts, cakes, mushrooms, bread, chicken livers, tuna, tiramisu.
Alright we get the picture! The food here is good for Christ's sake.
Everything was over-described to the point of parody. At one point he couldn't even hose down the brick patio without going into a paroxysm over the earthy smell of the wet bricks permeating the entire house.
There was one hilarious moment when I thought the village was burning down. He launched into a typically purple bout of rhetoric using phrases like,
'I expected to see the dark town with faint lights against the sky, but instead saw the lower part of town ablaze with orange fire. The houses and the towers were black against the light, and some houses glowed, others were swept with flames, and the flames shot through the belfry of the steeple and the bell hung a stark black ....'
A bit later it is revealed that it was only the moon rising and it was a kind of orange colour.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Loving all things Italian
Comment: I enjoyed this book. I will be going back to Italy in the fall and will probably visit some small hill towns. Since this book, the Mates are now living in another part of Italy. It was fun to read. Once you read this one then read the next book "A Vineyard in Tuscany: A Wine Lover's Dream".
Customer Rating:
Summary: Experiencing Tuscany
Comment: I thought this book was an easy read and pleasant. It was just kind of a diary of the day to day life the author experienced when he bought a home in Tuscany. It was not an in depth study of life as a foreigner in a foreign country but then again I don't think that was his purpose in writing it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tuscany at its best
Comment: Very enjoyable reading, especially if you have vacationed in this area. I could picture the coutry side and the town of Montepluciana that he wrote about. I loved the area and loved Ferenc Mate's book, "The Hills of Tuscany". Some of us wishes that we could trade places with him, living there sounds devine.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Thoughts from Judith Petres Balogh
Comment: What a delightful arm-chair journey The Hills of Tuscany is! Máté's descriptions involve all senses and beyond that they make the reader yearn for something simple, ancient and cozy, -- to be close to earth and to our fellowmen, and to rediscover the joy of unpretentious things. His enjoyment of life is so obvious that his book would be a pleasure regardless where he settled, be it the Arctic Circle or the rainforest of Costa Rica.
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