About Barbara Boyle
For years, Barbara Boyle enjoyed a colorful worldwide career as a Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi, Grey, Lowe and other advertising agencies, creating commercials and stories for Tide, Pampers, Johnson’s Baby, Snickers and dozens of other venerated brands. Always a writer, this is the first time she has had the time required to author a book. Her fiction has appeared recently in Sky Island Journal, Star 82 Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other literary journals.
Food and wine have also been a lifelong passion for Barbara. While living in Paris, she took the Regional French Cuisine course at Le Cordon Bleu and later completed the professional cooking course at The Institute of Culinary Education in New York. She enjoys learning about both the world class cuisine and the local wines of the region as she resides in her home in Piemonte with her husband, Kim, surrounded by orchards, vineyards and barking deer.
Barbara spends her days in the medieval hill towns of Roddino and Monforte, writing, cooking, taking walks, working in her garden and her husband’s young vineyard, enjoying the life they have created together. When she can, she works on improving her Italian, and even sometimes helps to teach her neighbors English. Of course, she also takes advantage of living in Italy to travel throughout the country and across Europe, always leaving room in her calendar to return to San Francisco to spend time with her family and friends. She continues to write short fiction as well as her weekly Substack letters, and has begun the outline of her next book.
“This is the story of how my husband and I leave our busy and familiar lives behind in San Francisco and begin taking apart a 300-year-old stone barn to build a new home, a new life, in Italy.
It is a story filled with discoveries, disappointments, pleasures, frustrations, and triumphs. And given the gastronomic excellence of the region, I would be remiss if I did not share a few recipes as well. In the end, it proves to be a journey that allows me to see the world, as well as myself, through a different window; a memoir filled with food, friendships, and scenes of Italy, of love and of the powerful joy that comes from building a dream.”
Barbara Boyle
