Word: tuscan
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...structure from The Decameron and a good part of its spirit from The Kama Sutra. Let's start with The Decameron. In Boccaccio's 14th century compendium of tales, 10 people depart Florence, where the Black Death is raging, for two weeks of food, drink and storytelling in the Tuscan countryside. In Smiley's update, the Iraq war stands in for the plague. Los Angeles, the silkier parts, plays Tuscany. As the war begins, 10 people find themselves in Max's spacious house in Pacific Palisades, where they trade stories, make breakfast and couple--here's the Kama Sutra part...
...industrial stretch of flatlands east of Pisa, Cascina is hardly the postcard Italy of undulating olive groves. With an auto-parts store behind the cemetery and the stripped face of a gravel mine in the distance, the burial service last week somehow seemed more Texan than Tuscan. Summers was wearing a pink Wrangler cowboy shirt and black pants inside the closed white coffin now pulled beside the back of the black Mercedes hearse...
There are no sarcastic e-mails from Dublin, surprisingly, and no arrogant text messages from the Tuscan coast. As soon as Boston thermometers dipped below 40, I was half-expecting a “Wish You Were Here” postcard from Valencia. Instead, I didn’t get so much as voicemail...
...Minding Her Manners In her review of the Tuscan hotel L'Andana [Sept. 4], Catherine Mayer says the general manager might remember her as "the Guest from Hell: high maintenance, capricious and, quite frankly, badly behaved." She adds, "I was only doing my job." But was it really necessary for her to engage in the absolutely obnoxious behavior she went on to describe? I'm sure that by the time she and her companions got through with the staff and management of L'Andana, the smug trio left behind more than a few bad feelings. I have close friends...
...boiled water on the stove for sponge baths for three days until French repairmen appeared. "The French have a different sense of urgency," Conlon says dryly. That hasn't deterred the couple from planning a regular sabbatical, however. Who can resist playing English cottager, Parisian apartment dweller or Tuscan farmhouse owner--if only for a short while...