One Italian Summer

One Italian Summer is required reading for anyone who’s ever dreamed of escaping the rat race and setting off for greener pastures.

Pip Williams wasn’t the first to suspect she might be happier ditching her career for a simple life of farming, baking and knitting hideous woollen beanies for her kids, but she is one of the few who’s risked everything to follow that possibility across the world. Over one life-changing summer, Pip got down and dirty WWOOFing on the farms of Italy, having her expectations doused in cold water and getting a clear head about what a ‘good life’ really means. After a trip with more twists than a Neopolitan gelato, she returned to Australia with her dreams shattered – and reformed into something new. Warm, funny and disarmingly honest, this is the book Elizabeth Gilbert might have written if she had travelled to Italy ten years later, with two kids and a partner in tow.
 
Praise for One Italian Summer
‘Pip Williams’ elegant prose transported me deep into the heart of Tuscany. A delightful, insightful book, and the most eloquent advert for a working holiday I’ve ever read.’ Christine McCabe, author of A Garden in the Hills
 
‘A book as rich and wise and full of goodness as the good life it seeks to define.’ Carol Le Fevre, author of Nights in the Asylum
 
‘Warm as a Tuscan evening, generous as broken bread and honest enough to question whether happiness is really a hill of compost.’ Max Anderson, author of Digger
 
Fast Facts
Australia has the largest Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) network with over 2636 hosts and between 10,000 – 12,000 workers every year.*
 
The Slow Food movement started in Italy in 1981 after a demonstration at the site of a proposed McDonald’s at the Spanish Steps in Rome. Today it’s a worldwide movement with over 1500 branches worldwide#
 
*Green Compass Magazine: http://www.greencompassmag.com/wwoof-australia-a-brief-history/
# Slow Food Network: http://www.greencompassmag.com/wwoof-australia-a-brief-history/
 
Pip Williams is co-author of the book Time Bomb: Work, Rest and Play in Australia Today (New South Press, 2012). As a social scientist she has also published many articles broadly interested in how to live a good life, and these have been the subject of interviews and discussions in all major newspapers and on national and regional radio. In addition to Time Bomb, Pip has published travel articles, book reviews for print and radio, and flash fiction. She is very proud of a poem she published in Dolly Magazine when she was 15 years old, and is currently working on a novel. Pip lives in the Adelaide Hills with her partner, two boys and an assortment of animals.
 
Publication date: April
Category: Memoir
Paperback: 256 pages
RRP: $29.99
ISBN: 9781925344981