A delightfully warm and intimate portrait of life in a small rural town in Tuscany.

In Maremma recounts David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell's restoration of a dilapidated 1950's farmhouse in southern Tuscany and the process by which they became initiated into a part of Italian life that foreigners rarely see. The pleasures of the olive harvest and picking wild asparagus are juxtaposed with the vagaries of political corruption and self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Landscape and weather provide the stuff of reverie, as do the benefits of boredom and the longing for peanut butter. A celebration and exploration of a little-known part of Italy, In Maremma is also a fond if sometimes critical corrective to other more rapturous portrayals of Tuscany.