Product 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21464 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-03
• Released on: 2003-06-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

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.

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.

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

Customer Reviews

More than a fairy tale; maybe it's also a parable
Details, the essence of domesticity, shine in this story. There are the travelogue-esque descriptions of Venice: Napoleon's observation about Piazza San Marco and viewing works of art sequestered in ancient churches. There's a discussion of making house, once in the Midwest in a little house I would love to see and again in the grotty chaos of a bachelor's digs. And throughout are delicious descriptions of food and drink and the ways and places to enjoy them.

Like youth, this book may be somewhat wasted on the young. The small ruminations, the reflections on how we find a place and make a place in life may seem over-wrought. Until the onset of my own middle-age, I felt the same way about such memoirs. Now, I greet writings like this with a mixture of recognition and enthusiasm: recognition of the silly ways we fumble along and enthusiasm for another's discovery that it is not too late to savour what is delicious about life. In that, I find a parable of encouragement.

Such a charming book!
I have spent the last two nights in Venice... not really, but I feel as though I have, lying in bed amidst fluffy pillows, with a glass of red wine and my hot-off-the-presses copy of A Thousand Nights in Venice. What delightful book it is, Marlena takes us all on a romantic journey into the unknown. What happens when you meet the love of your life in, um, for lack of a better term -- middle age? How do you pick up and move across the world to an unknown place and cast your lot with a charming stranger? So many of us have had this fantasy while traveling, Marlena had the courage to act on the opportunity when it appeared. She has a lovely way with words, her descriptions of people, places, and best of all -- food, will sweep readers into an exotic world. Enjoy!

A dissenting opinion
I hate to be a dissenting opinion, but the other side of the coin ought to be revealed. I was puzzled with this story because it seemed to me that the author up and moved to Venice to marry a man she knew (barely) peripherally. It wasn't like they'd had a long distance romance for years...and then decided to marry. They met, visited each other a couple times. Then once she's living with him, she is frustrated with the adjustment and his foreign (to her) ways and continues to call him "the stranger" even after they are married! It seemed too whimsical and I couldn't really feel bad for her frustrations given that she went into this pretty blindly. What did interest me was her in depth knowledge of Venice itself, which I'm sure she could've delved deeper into and provided us with more tidbits the average tourist wouldn't uncover. I also appreciated her detail of the Italian culture (ie: wedding plans, renovating the house, the moving process). I won't say I wouldn't recommend the book because I do feel there's an audience for it, I just won't be giving my copy out freely and endorsing it as the read of the summer.