Traveling Beyond the Tuscan Sun

"I love to wake up in a new country and know a whole new world is right there for me to explore," says author Frances Mayes, whose memoir Under the Tuscan Sun was only the beginning of her appeal to the womantraveler in all of us. In an interview with the Sacramento Bee, Mayes describes her adventurous spirit, which she also chronicles in her new book, A Year in the World. "You hear so many travelers wanting to put things into their own contexts, but I want a city to be 'other' and foreign,'" she adds. Like many Southern writers, Mayes transforms the places she goes into essential "characters." Her new book is about moving through other world travel destinations with her husband Ed.