A transplanted American chef and food writer continues her story of her life in Italy, describing her and her husband's move to Orvieto as they search for and find the perfect home, which turns out to be the former ballroom of a fifteenth-century palazzo.

Every week on a Thursday evening, a group of four Italian rural women gather in a stone house in the hills above Italy's Orvieto. There--along with their friend, Marlena--they cook together, sit down to a beautiful supper, drink their beloved local wines, and talk. Surrounded by candlelight, good food and friendship, Miranda, Ninucia, Paolina, and Gilda tell their life stories of loves lost and found, of ageing and abandonment, of mafia grudges and...