In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany Book

[ [We] bought several earthenware planters adorned in the old-fashioned syle with mythological figures and costing about fifty dollars each. (Later we saw more or less the same planters advertised in an English gardening magazine for almost a thousand pounds apiece.) [...] [W]e had read in the same gardening magazine [...] if you aren't killing things, you aren't trying hard enough. (p43 | Il Giardino)
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[D]espite their acute devotion to Nutella - that ubiquitous chocolate-and-hazelnut pasted that most European children spread on their breakfast toast - most Italians disdain peanut butter on the grounds that is is bad for the liver. (p86 | The Hershey Connection)
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Once a friend of ours sublet the Paris apartment of an American woman who had lived in France for many years. After taking him on a tour of the premises, she showed him the kitchen, which was stocked with all the classic staples of French cooking: cornichons, Dijon mustard, tarragon drying in bunches. Our friend was busy admiring all these ingredients, [...] when he noticed the six boxes of Duncan Hines cake mix. "Eat anything you want," the woman said when she saw waht he was looking at, "but touch my Duncan Hines cake mix and I'll kill you."
[...]
During David's twelfth summer, he and his mother discovered from a cooking show called The Romagnolis' Table that pasta could be served with a sauce that wasn't red. The recipe in question was for spaghetti alla carbonara, and the next evening, with a sense of adventure, they prepared some. Of course they had to approximate: instead of pancetta, a hunk of salt pork, Creamettes spaghetti, "Parmesan cheese" from a green cardboard shaker. The olive oil was a pallid yellow[...] Even so, as they ate that first carbonara, it seemed to them for an instant that they could hear the Tiber flowing outside their kitchen window.
    After that-years after that - we moved to Italy. When we first arrived, of course, we disdained anything that tasted too much of America, exulting instead in the Italian-ness of the things we found at the grocery store: peppery olive oil, nearly translucent slivers of Parma ham, wheels of pecorino cheese that the salumiere cut with a wire. [...] Soon wonderful food became something we felt we could count on (a very Italian attitude . . .and then, one morning about three years later, we woke up wanting . . .peanut butter. So we went out an bought some [...] In this way it began. Cereal was next - corn flakes, Rice Krispies, even Cocoa Puffs. Then cream of mushroom soup. Then [...] (p89,90 | Turkey Tetrazzini)
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Oh, how difficult it must be to be a woman in Italy! Sons are valued more than daughters, and so the only way for a woman to make amends for the tragedy of her birth is to get married and ahve a boy. And yet life is rarely easy for these boys who have been breast-fed until they were five and pushed around in strollers until they were seven. One sees them, pampered and ill-tempered, at the terme, their mothers standing anxiously at poolside in case they start to drown [...] More grown men than one might imagine stay in the children's pool because they are afraid of drowing, or think they are, since their mothers worried so much about them drowning when they were boys. (94,97 | At the Terme)
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No house is ever really finished, or finished for long. The workmen leave, months pass, you cook and spill olive oil on the terra-cotta. Spiders build webs, you brush them away and perhaps leave a fingerprint. [...] Everywhere there are things you haven't done: One room lacks a bracket for keeping the shutter open; in another a hole still needs to be drilled for the hanging of a picture. Yet for all that the house is more beautiful, not less. In the words of Margaret Drabble, it has "weathered into identity." (139 | Incompletion) (hide spoiler)]