Under The Tuscan Sun on the big screen

My friend Jennny and I ate Subway sandwiches and watched snippets of my wedding video cds, and then I drove us to Showcase Cinemas to watch Under A Tuscan Sun. A chick-night indeed. But it was a good night. The movie was one of those feel-good shows and it was all about Italy! Okay, it was about Frances Mayes, played by the lovely Diane Lane, and how she gets her life back on track, or on a different track, in Cortona, Italy, to be specific.

The vistas were lovely and got lovelier as the movie progressed. It was a long show, but I didn't mind gazing at the Tuscan landscape, or the sea at Positano, or the old buildings, or the run-down house that eventually became a beautiful villa. Of course, Positano boasted more than the sea - that's where the splendid looking Marcello lived and took Lane's Frances to visit. What shoulders, what cheekbones, what a smile... . He's got better skin than I do (damn it!). If you watch the movie and it does nothing for you, I'm sure Raoul Bova will (unless you don't fancy guys).

The movie is loosely based on the best-selling Frances Mayes memoir of her life in Cortona as she refurbishes the villa, Bramasole. Quite different, but the movie can stand on its on. If nothing else, the movie made me miss Italy even more. When I saw the facade of the Duomo in Florence rise on the screen, I could almost smell again the rain that poured on one of the last Sunday afternoons I spent in Florence. I was waiting for my friends and it was raining (just like in the movie), I went inside the Duomo, which was being decorated for Christmas, and I sat next to and befriended an old Italian man who thought I was Japanese and who later kissed me on both cheeks and wished me happy holidays. I need to go back - not for the old man, but for the feeling. That unmistakable feeling you get when you're walking on the same stones that great artists once tread upon, when you're gazing at a landscape that turns your heart to putty, when you're hiking right by the Mediterranean Sea and threading through grape vines. Nothing ever gets to you the way Italy does.

Posted by Monoceros at September 26, 2003 11:08 PM