She explores.

The hardware store. The French bakery. The antiques stores.

"You have to get there early or they sell out," she says of Valour's Patisserie & Bistro. Mayes peers into the French pastry shop's window, admiring the freshly baked Danishes, buttery croissants and blueberry, raspberry and apple fruit tarts.

She strolls past Dual Supply Co., an old-fashioned hardware store, and points out a hand-cranked ice cream maker. "I have one just like that I use once a year," she says with a soft laugh.

Mayes, the best-selling author of the 1996 "Under the Tuscan Sun," has moved from San Francisco to the Triangle. She has a home in Durham and a small office in Hillsborough.

But make no mistake, Durham is her American home. Mayes will continue to spend half the year in Cortona, Italy.

Legions of fans picture Mayes as actress Diane Lane, who starred in the movie version of "Tuscan Sun," restoring Bramasole, the villa and farm the author renovated.

The travel memoir, though, was more than a story about fixing up an old Italian ruin. It was about savoring life, taking time to live in the moment and enjoying family and friends. Mayes turned ordinary chores such as cooking, cleaning and gardening into fine art, the art of putting time into the things that matter.

And, with the work, Mayes expanded the definition of home. "Home to me is an instinctual feeling. Something you can't argue with," she says. "You just know you are there. It's not a logical, rational type thing at all. It's a feeling."

She has found that feeling now, she says, in Durham. It is a homecoming of sorts. The move marks a return to her first home, the South, after more than 30 years away.

In her newest and fifth travel memoir, "A Year In the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller," Mayes and her husband, Ed Mayes, a poet, live in 12 different locales, immersing themselves in the culture and the community.

Mayes, you see, is a woman who has learned to create home wherever she goes.

Back to the South

If you listen carefully, you can hear a faint drawl in Mayes' voice.

It was one of the attributes that drew her husband to her. "It was the most noticeable thing, her lovely Georgia accent," Ed Mayes says now.

Both Ed and Frances are from small towns. He's from Minnesota. Frances Mayes grew up in Fitzgerald, Ga., a place she describes as a tiny town of 10,000 people. "I think it's gone down to 8,000."

"My grandfather was the mayor. My father ran the cotton mill and my mother played bridge. But it was a very wild family, very uncontrolled. It was a challenge to grow up with them," she says with a laugh, but still serious.

"My parents had parties all the time, a lot of drinking and carousing. I was the third child and I ran wild, too."

It was during her childhood that Mayes developed a sense of independence. She wanted more than what her parents expected of her: to be a good wife.

"I left home and didn't come back," she says.

In Durham, Mayes is near her daughter's family and one of her oldest friends, Anne Dellinger, who lives in Chapel Hill. The two met as freshmen at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Va. Dellinger, a retired professor from the Institute of Government at UNC-Chapel Hill, recalls even then Mayes exuding self-confidence and having a strong interest in language. Her creativity was also apparent. "She had a magic to her. You almost feel like Frances can see leprechauns you can't."

Mayes also has several business interests based in North Carolina. She has a furniture collection, Frances Mayes At Home in Tuscany, with Drexel Heritage in High Point and a line of outdoor furniture under the same name with Laneventure in Conover.

And her space in Hillsborough places her among several fiction and nonfiction writers. During a recent visit to Brick Alley Books & Fine Handcrafts, co-owner Julia Williams tells Mayes, "We have 30 writers here."

Mayes quickly retorts, "Thirty-one."

Hillsborough fiction writer Lee Smith met Mayes at a party, but already felt acquainted. "When you've read her work for years, you feel like you really know her. Then when you meet her, you do know her."

But even before that, Smith recognized Mayes as a fellow Southern writer. She says one of her favorite pieces by Mayes is about Venice. "She talks about the Southern swamps of her childhood, the water, the low land. Her ability to completely put herself in a place and understand it is a very Southern thing."

Smith also points out Mayes' appreciation for food and her gift of narrative, notes, Smith says, that are also Southern. "She's the type of person you want to sit on the porch with," Smith says.

Mayes acknowledges that her roots haunted her while she was away.

"I love the summers in the South ... I've always missed that air in the South. It's a kind of nebulous thing to say. I've been all over the world, but to me the air in the South is not like anywhere else in the world. Even in the winter, there is something limpid and soft about the air here. And I just respond to Southern landscape. I like the color of the dirt. I connect to it on kind of a pulse level. It's home to me."

Yet it also gave her a way to connect to her adopted land.

"I have always felt that way about the South. I feel it even more in Italy though. Oddly enough, I'm not Italian. I don't have a drop of Italian blood. I have no real connection there other than the connection I have made. But I too just felt, I live here. This is the best place I can think of to live."

At home in Italy

Mayes was first struck by the lifestyles of the Italians, when she went to Italy in mid-1960s with her first husband.

"I went to Bologna. It's this wonderful piazza with the arcades. It was full of people having espresso, visiting with their friends, just this vibrancy of life there, and I said to my husband, 'they're having more fun than we are.' What's going on here? We were having fun, too, but I could see they had something I wanted to know about."

Mayes was married about 15 years to her first husband. After their divorce, she sought solace in Italy. She was a creative writing professor at San Francisco State University and a well-established poet.

"I'd been married for a long time and I thought, well, all of that is behind me, what's out front? ... I wanted to find something to go toward that was as large as what was behind me. I always loved Italy. I've always loved the culture, and the people and the food, the history, the literature. I thought it would substitute nicely for just one man," she laughs.

She and her then boyfriend, Ed, also a professor in the Bay Area at the time, started going to Italy during their summers and semester breaks and renting houses there.

"It was something we were doing together, starting out a new life in a new culture," she says.

Ed Mayes says his wife is the perfect traveling companion for him. "She's incredibly curious about everything, not just tourist sites. We take lots of books of poetry. We would look at the world as a poet does, trying to make the world new every moment."

Eventually, Mayes went from renting to buying and renovating Bramasole, which she has now owned for 16 years.

"The house sits on a side of the hill. It was a crumbling ruin, which I brought back to life," she says.

An Etruscan wall from the eighth century B.C. is above the house. Below it is the valley where Hannibal defeated the Romans in 217 B.C. It exudes an ancient time and place. She found herself not just at home but at peace there.

When the couple left Italy to return to San Francisco to teach, they found themselves wanting to be in Italy more and more and California less and less. They were in love with each other and the place.

"I was so influenced by the house there," says Mayes. It was in Bramasole that she shifted from poetry to writing prose.

The home and her love for Italy have also inspired several books. She followed her successful "Under the Tuscan Sun" with the sequel, "Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy." She also wrote "In Tuscany" and "Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Tuscany."

"The house really anchored me. I put down my taproot there. It gave me that sense of home. I walk in there and everything falls away. It's a house that has a kind of spirit to it."

Seize the day

Still, even with that anchor, Mayes found that life can leave you unmoored.

After her mother died and several of her friends were diagnosed with breast cancer, Mayes quit her teaching position in 2001. Her husband soon followed.

It was all too much. Mayes decided to spend the rest of her life doing what she wanted.

"I started thinking all these countries I've wanted to live in and I just have one life. ... So I started making a list of them and it clicked with me wouldn't it be great to write a book about it, to be at home in these places ... and I just got the sense, what are you waiting for? No time like the present."

"A Year In the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller" chronicles that journey.

In the book, she moves from place to place: the British Isles, Greece, Capri, Portugal and more. As you read you know that once again Frances Mayes has found home.

Yet, when asked how she finds home, how even a place she is visiting becomes home, she's not really sure.

"I think it's very mysterious. It's the kind of thing you don't argue with. If I had to analyze it, I would say, the people. I like to feel at home with the people. The Italians really know how to live, and that's a quality I appreciate. They are not way back in their lives. They are up forward. They are out in the piazza every day. They are with their friends. They have a wonderful sense of family.

"In America, we battle against time. We're always wondering what time is it, where am I going, where am I suppose to be. My agenda is jammed.

"There, they get their work done ... but they still have time to enjoy life. Their lives come first."

And so, in her new home in Durham, Mayes makes time for the sweetness of life: arranging yellow roses in a vase, sipping and savoring cappuccino her husband makes each morning, or walking on the golf course with her 4-year-old grandson.

"I like to have the flowers in the house all the time. As my sister says, 'do something to sweeten the house everyday.'

"It's such a metaphor for me for the way you live," she continues. "A sense of well-being is very connected to my surroundings.

"I admire people who can live in one room with a bunk bed and a simple table. But I always want beauty."

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