'Usually you write a book, there's a buzz, and then things settle down,' Mayes says. There are two new books in the works, and - move over, Martha Stewart - in the fall Mayes launched her own furniture line with Drexel Heritage, a collection called 'At Home in Tuscany' that includes reproductions of antiques Mayes has collected across Italy. Her first novel, 'Swan,' a story inspired by memories of her hometown of Fitzgerald, Ga., hit bookstores during the movie shoot. Lately, Mayes has had plenty to woo-hoo about. 'When I found out this morning,' she said, 'I felt like throwing open the window and going woo-hoo, woo-hoo!' Hours before a phone interview from her home in Cortona, Italy, three weeks after the release of the Touchstone Pictures movie, 'Under the Tuscan Sun,' Mayes (M.A., '75) learned that her memoir was back at #1 on the Times' nonfiction bestseller list.

The Hollywood version, which hit theaters in September, takes a few liberties with the book, but Mayes says the message is the same, that life in Italy is indeed la dolce vita. Mayes chronicled their scrubbing, digging, cooking, shopping, planting, and painting in 'Under the Tuscan Sun,' a 1996 memoir which enjoyed an initial 162-week stay on The New York Times bestseller list. She and her future husband, Ed, enlisted the help of workers who lived nearby to restore the house to its former glory. In 1990 Frances Mayes, then a professor at SFSU, sank her savings into a dilapidated 300-year-old villa in Tuscany.

Frances mayes