CAPPUCCINO PER FAVORE

Lehman recounts her midlife adventures as a single woman abroad in this memoir and travelogue.

“As a young girl,” the American author notes in the book’s opening chapter, “I didn’t dream about getting married, having a house full of kids, and a white picket fence.” Instead, she writes, “I dreamed about travel; I fantasized about adventure.” As a real estate investor with multiple properties in Key West, Florida, and a vacation cottage in Wisconsin, Lehman had an idyllic life until the economic crash of 2008 forced her into bankruptcy. Divorced, without a steady source of income, and “closing in on middle age,” she boldly decided to go on a three-month adventure to Europe in 2009. This book blends a travel journal with a broader memoir; the author recalls her various exploits, including religious pilgrimages to Christianholy sitesand cathedrals (such as Notre Dame) and hiking in the Alps. Although Lehman highlights compelling landscapes and awe-inspiring trips to museums and historic sites, she also relishes small delicacies (such as her fondness for the titular cup of steaming cappuccino) and the personal relationships she formed along the way. Traveling on the Queen Mary 2, she says, she spent many nights “Waltzing Across the Atlantic” in the ocean liner’s famed ballroom. Europe also provided a new dating scene that reinvigorated her romantic life, and Lehman blends humor with her reflections. While recalling an intimate moment with an Italian beau, for example, she notes contradictory feelings of sexual excitement and Catholic guilt (worsened, she notes, because he wore a crucifix). Written in a conversational, intimate style, the book’s empowering narrative offers a pitch-perfect blend of seduction, despair, and poignant insight that often reads like a novel. The fact that the author’s anecdotes occur in some of the world’s most beautiful locales, documented in an array of photographs and paintings, is a bonus.

An inspiring story of finding adventure and purpose after despair.