"A beautiful love story"
In St. Louis, Marlena lives alone having been divorced and
her two adult children out from the roost. She is a
successful chef and food writer, but has little to show in
her recent personal life. Marlena travels to Venice where
the Stranger stares at her as if she is Miss Italy. Banker
Fernando believes that he has found his soul mate. They
talk and share a romantic interlude before she returns to
Missouri. Surprisingly, he travels to the States to persuade Marlena
that this is love. She agrees to go to Venice because this
may be love. Neither understands the desires of the other
except for the passion between them, yet a warm
relationship
forms as love, indeed, flourishes. However, will her
spontaneity and her love for cooking die or will she bring
her beloved into the world of the gourmand. Marlena de Blasi provides uses the novel format to explain
how she and her beloved met, fell in love, and forged a
relationship. The true story simmers slowly so that those
who demand instant gratification will want to pass. Those
readers who relish a tasteful morsel (and a few recipes)
will appreciate this true eternal love story found during
the author's middle age when society catalogues folks as
part of the over the hill gang. Harriet Klausner
Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted May 17, 2003
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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.
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