Bramasole, Explained

Bramasole is the house at the centre of the whole story — and the thing most visitors get wrong twice over. The name isn’t a place name, and the house you’re picturing probably isn’t the one you’ve seen.

This is part of our guide to Under the Tuscan Sun in Cortona.

What the name means

Bramasole is a compound of two Italian words:

• bramare — to yearn for, to long for, to crave
• sole — the sun

So: something that yearns for the sun. Frances Mayes explains in the book that the villa was named for the way it faces and takes the light — it sits on a south-facing slope and holds the sun for most of the day. Whoever named it centuries ago was describing a fact about the building.

It’s also, as Mayes noticed, a rather good description of what she was doing there: buying a wreck on a hillside in a country she didn’t yet live in, and hoping.

Italians don’t generally use bramasole as a word. It’s a house name — the kind of affectionate, slightly poetic naming that Tuscan properties often carry.

Where the house actually is

Bramasole stands on the hillside above Cortona’s historic centre, in the area known as Torreone, along the road that climbs past the Basilica di Santa Margherita and out into the countryside. It faces south, over the olive terraces and down across the Val di Chiana.

We’re not publishing the address, and you’ll notice the better guides don’t either. It’s a private home with people living in it.

What you can do — and what genuinely gives you the landscape of the book — is walk up that way. The stepped path from the centre up to Santa Margherita and the Fortezza del Girifalco takes you through exactly the terrain Mayes writes about: the terraces, the stone walls, the light coming off the valley in the late afternoon. It’s a fifteen-to-twenty-minute climb from the centre and one of the best things to do in Cortona regardless of whether you’ve read a word of the book.

Why you can’t visit it

Because it’s a house, and someone lives in it.

Bramasole is Frances Mayes’s private residence. It is not a museum, not a hotel, not a winery, and there is no tour. There is no gift shop. There is nothing to see from the road except a gate, and people do still turn up at that gate, which is precisely the problem.

Mayes bought the villa in 1989 with her partner Ed Kleinschmidt, a fellow poet; they married in 1998 and he took her surname. The couple still split their time between Italy and North Carolina, and Mayes has taken Italian citizenship. Thirty-odd years on, they are simply neighbours in Cortona.

Treating that with a bit of restraint is part of being a decent guest in a town that has absorbed an enormous amount of attention with unusual grace.

The house in the film is a different house

Worth repeating, because it trips up almost everyone.

The villa on screen is Villa Laura, a few kilometres outside Cortona. The production used it for both exteriors and interiors. They needed a house that still looked neglected, and by 2002 Bramasole had been beautifully restored for over a decade — so the film’s “before” shots are a different property entirely.

The upside: Villa Laura can be rented. If your real wish is to stay in the house from the film, that one is actually available. We cover it, and every other location, in the filming locations guide.

How to do Bramasole properly

You can’t go in. But you can have the thing the book is actually about, which was never really the building:

• Walk up toward Santa Margherita and Torreone in the early morning or the hour before sunset. That light is the whole point.
• Go to the Saturday market in Piazza della Repubblica. Mayes’s Tuscany is a food book as much as a house book.
• Eat slowly and locally — pici, Chianina beef from the valley below, pecorino from the surrounding hills.
• Taste the local Syrah. The Cortona DOC barely existed when she wrote the book and is now part of the town’s identity — a nice measure of how much has changed since 1989.
• Stay two nights. The town in the early morning and after dusk is a genuinely different place from the town at midday.

For the practical side, start with our complete Cortona travel guide or go straight to where to stay. And if you’re still sorting fact from Hollywood, we’ve laid it all out in is Under the Tuscan Sun a true story?