Fernando first sees Marlena across the Piazza San Marco and falls 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; she, a divorced American chef
traveling through Italy, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thought
she was done with romantic love, incapable of intimacy. Yet within
months of their first meeting, she has quit her job, sold her house in
St. Louis, kissed her two grown sons good-bye, and moved to Venice to
marry "the stranger," as she calls Fernando.
This deliciously satisfying memoir is filled with the foods and flavors
of Italy and peppered with culinary observations and recipes. But the
main course here is an enchanting true story about a woman who falls in
love with both a man and a city, and finally finds the home she didn't
even know she was missing.