From Publishers Weekly
On a visit to Venice, de Blasi meets a local bank manager who falls in love with her at first sight. After "the stranger" (as she coyly calls him throughout the book) pursues her back to her home in St. Louis, Mo., she agrees to return to Italy and marry him, leaving behind her grown children and her job as chef and partner in a cafe. Although the banker, Fernando, lives in a bunkerlike postwar condominium on the Lido rather than the Venetian palazzo of her dreams, and some of his European ideas about women clash with her American temperament, the relationship works. She survives his criticism of her housekeeping and his displeasure at her insistence on remaining a serious cook (in modern Italy "No one bakes bread or dolci or makes pasta at home," he tells her), and they marry. Then one day Fernando surprises her by announcing that he is quitting his job at the bank where he has worked for 26 years. They leave Venice, he espouses her interest in food and they now direct gastronomic tours of Tuscany and Umbria. De Blasi's breathless descriptions of her improbable love affair can be cloying, but she makes up for these excesses with her enchanting accounts of Venice, especially of the markets at the Rialto. She conjures up vivid images of produce "so sumptuously laid as to be awaiting Caravaggio" and picturesque scenes of the vendors, such as the egg lady who keeps her hens under her table, collects the eggs as soon as they are laid and wraps each one in newspaper, "twisting both ends so that the confection looks like a rustic prize for a child's party." In a final section entitled "Food for a Stranger," de Blasi (Regional Foods of Northern Italy) includes recipes for a few of the dishes with which she charmed the stranger.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
Venice is almost synonymous with romance, and in this charming account de Blasi spares no detail in telling us how she fell under its spell. A journalist, restaurant critic, and food consultant, de Blasi left her home, her grown children, and her job as a chef in St. Louis to marry Fernando, a Venetian she barely knew. In defiance of the cynics who think true love in middle age is crazy, her marriage flourished, as these two strangers made a life together. Food comforted the newlyweds when their conflicting cultures almost divided them, and in the end marital harmony reigns. Is this book a romance, a food guide, or an exhortation for us to come to Venice and experience the magic? Ultimately, it is all three, and there is even an appendix that includes recipes for dishes described in the text. Recommended for larger travel, biography, or cooking collections. Olga B. Wise, Compaq Computer Corp., Austin, TX
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
A mature American woman traveling in Italy finds herself delicately but persistently pursued by a mysterious Venetian. Despite her initial reluctance, she eventually succumbs to his determination and agrees to meet him. When he follows her home to St. Louis, she takes him seriously, and she agrees to marry him. Thus chef and writer Marlena de Blasi recounts her fantasy-like romance. Returning to Venice for the marriage, she takes a leap of faith, dissolving her Missouri apartment and business. She carefully notes and lovingly describes all the Venetian neighborhoods and the many islands of the Venetian lagoon that figure in her maturing affair. Along the way she introduces a host of characters, such as the chain-smoking Italian consul who cautions her about marrying an Italian man. The author also reveals something of her first disastrous marriage and her now grown children. A handful of elegant, inspiring recipes for foods that have figured in the text round out the book. Venice-lovers will connect with the passions depicted in this memoir. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
“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



Book Description


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.




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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
Signora, the Telephone Is for You

The small room is filled with German tourists, a few English, and a table or two of locals. It’s November 6, 1993, and I arrived in Venice that morning, two friends in tow. We speak quietly together, sipping Amarone. Time passes and the room empties, but I notice that one table, the one farthest away from us, remains occupied. I feel the gentle, noninvasive stare of one of the four men who sit there. I turn my shoulders in, toward my wine, never really looking at the man. Soon the gentlemen go off, and we three are alone in the place. A few minutes pass before a waiter comes by to say there is a telephone call for me. We have yet to announce our arrival to friends, and even if someone knew we were in Venice, they couldn’t possibly know we were lunching at Vino Vino. I tell the waiter he’s mistaken. “No, signora. Il telefono è per Lei,” he insists. “Pronto,” I say into the old, orange wall telephone that smells of smoke and men’s cologne.

“Pronto. Is it possible for you to meet me tomorrow at the same time? It’s very important for me,” says a deep, deliberate, Italian voice I’d never heard before. In the short silence that follows it somehow clicks that he is one of the men who’d left the restaurant just moments before. Though I’ve understood fairly well what he has said, I can’t respond in Italian. I mumble some linguistic fusion like, “No, grazie. I don’t even know who you are,” thinking that I really like his voice.

The next day we decide to return to Vino Vino because of its convenience to our hotel. I don’t think about the man with the beautiful voice. But he’s there, and this time he’s without his colleagues and looking more than a little like Peter Sellers. We smile. I go off to sit with my friends, and he, seeming not quite to know how to approach us, turns and goes out the door. A few beats pass before the same waiter, now feeling a part of something quite grand, comes to me, eyes direct: “Signora, il telefono è per Lei.” There ensues a repeat of yesterday’s scene. I go to the phone, and the beautiful voice speaks in very studied English, perhaps thinking it was his language I hadn’t understood the day before: “Is it possible for you to meet me tomorrow, alone?”

“I don’t think so,” I fumble, “I think I’m going to Naples.”
“Oh,” is all the beautiful voice can say.
“I’m sorry,” I say and hang up the phone.

We don’t go to Naples the next day or the day after, but we do go to the same place for lunch, and Peter Sellers is always there. We never speak a word face to face. He always telephones. And I always tell him I can’t meet him. On the fifth day—a Friday—our last full day in Venice, my friends and I spend the morning at Florian mapping the rest of our journey, drinking Prosecco and cups of bitter, thick chocolate lit with Grand Marnier. We decide not to have lunch but to save our appetites for a farewell dinner at Harry’s Bar. Walking back to the hotel, we pass by Vino Vino, and there is Peter Sellers, his nose pressed against the window. A lost child. We stop in the calle a moment, and my friend Silvia says, “Go inside and talk to him. He has the dearest face. We’ll meet you at the hotel.”

I sit down next to the sweet face with the beautiful voice, and we drink some wine. We talk very little, something about the rain, I think, and why I didn’t come to lunch that day. He tells me he is the manager of a nearby branch of Banca Commerciale Italiana, that it’s late, and he has the only set of keys to reopen the safe for the after-noon’s business. I notice the sweet face with the beautiful voice has wonderful hands. His hands tremble as he gathers his things to leave. We agree to meet at six-thirty that evening, right there, in the same place. “Proprio qui, Right here,” he repeats again and again.

I walk to the hotel with a peculiar feeling and spend the afternoon lolling about my little room, only half celebrating my tradition of reading Thomas Mann in bed. Even after all these years of coming to Venice, every afternoon is a ritual. Close by on the night table I place some luscious little pastry or a few cookies or, if lunch was too light, maybe one, crusty panino which Lino at the bottega across the bridge from my Pensione Accademia has split and stuffed with prosciutto, then wrapped in butcher’s paper. I tuck the down quilt under my arms and open my book. But today I read and don’t read the same page for an hour. And the second part of the ritual falls away altogether, the part where I wander out to see images Mann saw, touch stones he touched. Today all I can think about is him.

The persevering rain becomes a tempest that night, but I am resolved to meet the stranger. Lagoon waters splash up and spill over onto the river in great foaming pools and the Piazza is a lake of black water. The winds seem the breath of furies. I make my way to the warm safety of the bar at the Hotel Monaco but no farther. Less than a few hundred yards from Vino Vino, I’m so close but I can get no closer. I go to the desk and ask for a telephone directory, but the wine bar is not listed. I try calling assistenza but operator number 143 finds nothing. The rendezvous is a wreckage, and I haven’t a way to contact Peter Sellers. It was just not meant to be. I head back to the hotel bar, where a waiter called Paolo stuffs my soaked boots with newspaper and places them near a radiator with the same ceremony someone else might use to stow the crown jewels. I’ve known Paolo since my first trip to Venice four years earlier. Stocking-footed, fidgeting, drinking tea, I sit on the damp layers of my skirt, which sends up the wooly perfume of wet lambs, and watch fierce, crackling lights rip the clouds. I think back to my very first time in Venice. Lord, how I fought that journey! I’d been in Rome for a few days, and I’d wanted to stay. But there I was, hunkered down in a second-class train, heading north. “ARE YOU GOING TOVENICE?” asks a small voice in tentative Italian, trespassing on my Roman half-dream.

I open my eyes and look out the window to see we have pulled into Tiburtina. Two young, pink-faced German women are hoisting their great packs up into the overhead space, thrusting their ample selves down onto the seat opposite me. “Yes,” I finally answer, in English, to a space somewhere between them. “For the first time,” I say.

They are serious, shy, dutifully reading the Lorenzetti guide to Venice and drinking mineral water in the hot, airless train car as it lunges and bumps over the flat Roman countryside and up into the Umbrian hills. I close my eyes again, trying to find my place in the fable of life in the Via Giulia where I’d taken roof-top rooms in the ochered-rose palazzo that sits across from the Hungarian Art Academy. I’d decided I would go each

Friday to eat a bowlful of tripe at Da Felice in the Testaccio. I would shop every morning in Campo dei Fiori. I’d open a twenty-seat taverna in the Ghetto, one big table where the shop keeps and artisans would come to eat the good food I’d cook for them. I’d take a Corsican prince as my lover. His skin would smell of neroli blossoms, and he’d be poor as I would be, and we’d walk along the Tiber, going softly into our dotage. As I begin putting together the exquisite pieces of the prince’s face, the trespasser’s small voice asks, “Why are you going to Venice? Do you have friends there?”

“No. No friends,” I tell her. “I guess I’m going because I’ve never been there, because I think I should,” I say, more to myself than to her. I have hopelessly lost the prince’s face for the moment, and so I parry: “And why are you going to Venice?”

“For romance,” says the inquisitive one very simply.
My plainer truth is that I am going to Venice because I’m being sent there, to gather notes for a series of articles. Twenty-five hundred words on the bacari, traditional Venetian wine bars; twenty-five hundred more on the question of the city’s gradual sinking into the lagoon; and an upscale dining review. I would rather have stayed in Rome. I want to go back to my narrow green wooden bed in the strange little room tucked up in the fourth-floor eaves of the Hotel Adriano. I want to sleep there, to be awakened by powdery sunlight sifting in through the chinks in the shutters. I like the way my heart beats in Rome, how I can walk faster and see better. I like that I feel at home wandering through her ancient ecstasy of secrets and lies. I like that she’s taught me I am only a scintilla, a barely perceptible and transient gleam.

And I like that at lunch, with fried artichokes on my breath, I think of sup-per. And at supper I remember peaches that wait in a bowl of cool water near my bed. I’ve nearly retrieved the pieces of the prince’s face as the train lurches over the Ponte della Libertà. I open my eyes to see the lagoon.

Back then I could never have imagined how sweetly this
ravishing old Princess was to gather me up into her tribe, how she would dazzle and dance the way only she can, exploding a morning with gold-shot light, soaking an evening in the bluish mists of a trance. I smile at Paolo, a tribal smile, a soundless eloquence. He stays near, keeping my teapot full. It’s after eleven-thirty before the storm rests. I pull on boots all hardened into the shape of the newsprint stuffing. Damp hat over still-damp hair, still-damp coat, I gather myself for the walk back to the hotel. Something prickles, shivers forward in my consciousness. I try to remember if I’d told the stranger where we were staying. What’...