After a rough divorce, Frances, a 35-year-old professor and writer from San Francisco takes a tour of Tuscany at the urgings of her friends. On a whim she buys Bramasole, a run down villa in the Tuscan countryside and begins to piece her life together starting with the villa and finds that life sometimes has unexpected ways of giving her everything she wanted. Frances Mayes, a 35-year-old San Francisco writer, gets a divorce that leaves her with terminal writer's block and depression. Later, she decides to buy a house in Tuscany in order to change her life.