by Marlena De Blasi.

Ballantine. 283 Pages. $24

BY JEANNE NICHOLSON
Special to the Journal

This tale could happen in Italy. From the complexities of forbidden love to “the havoc wreaked by Sicily’s eternally bewildering culture,” Marlena De Blasi fans won’t be disappointed with her latest memoir, based on a mesmerizing true story set in Sicily’s remote mountainous region. To protect the still-living protagonists and their way of life, De Blasi has changed names and placed the narrative at a geographic distance from where their haunting love story in fact unfolded.

Lost one day while traveling through Sicily in search of a place to rest, De Blasi and her husband stumble upon an enormous, captivating villa surrounded by lush gardens, fields of golden wheat and grazing sheep hidden in the center of the island’s mountainous region. Unexpectedly, the patroness of the villa, known as Tosca, welcomes the couple, inviting them to stay “for a while.”

Tosca has devoted her considerable wealth and resources to the comfort and care of her household, composed in great part of widows who once worked the villa’s land alongside their husbands. The Sicilian women go about their tasks, care for one another and celebrate the rituals of a humble, well-lived life. Without fail, bountiful meals are laid for dozens of people in the declining, sumptuous regimental hall each day.

Over the course of the author’s stay, the beautiful matriarch confides an intricate, layered story of splendor, love, tragedy and startling duplicity — embellished with all of the folklore and social and political history that has characterized this remote region of Sicily over the centuries.

Tosca is now in her seventies, yet still graceful, beautiful and intuitively intrepid. She is the former ward of the region’s prince Leo, descended from the French nobles of Anjou.

In her proud way, over time, Tosca begins to reveal the astonishing events of her past, from her impoverished childhood to her mythic adoption and initiation into the glittering life of the prince’s palace during the late 1930s.

That Summer in Sicily re-creates Tosca’s riveting story — the unfolding of her romance with Prince Leo, his defiance of the local Mafia’s determination to maintain the historic disparity between wealthy landowners and the peasants, the clan’s dilemma over the “disposition” of the prince and the poignant consequence of their decision. Brilliantly crafted, the story lingers, thoroughly haunts beyond the final page. A perfect summer novel, it must not be missed.

DeBlasi has written three previous memoirs, A Thousand Days in Venice, A Thousand Days in Tuscany and The Lady in the Palazzo, as well as three books on the foods of Italy. THAT SUMMER IN SICILY,