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""Christmas is a fine travel writer, and the personal journey she shares is one with which more and more of us are dealing as all our lives move, with welcome and enriching detours, down their one-way streets."" -- Globe & Mail

Since the beginning of time, mothers and daughters have had notoriously fraught relationships. ""Show me a mother who says she has a good or great relationship with her daughter,"" Jane Christmas writes, ""and I'll show you a daughter who is in therapy trying to understand how it all went so horribly wrong.""

To smooth over five decades of constant clashing, Christmas takes her arthritic, incontinent, and domineering mother, Valeria -- a cross between Queen Victoria and Hyacinth Bucket of the British comedy Keeping Up Appearances -- on a tour of Italy.

Neither has been to Italy before, but both are fans of ancient art, architecture, and history. Will gazing at the fruits of the Italian Renaissance be enough to spark a renaissance in their relationship? As they wander along the winding Amalfi Coast, traverse St. Peter's Square in Rome, and sample the wines of Tuscany -- walkers, biscuits, shawls, and medications in tow -- they revisit the bickering and bitterness of years past and reassess who they are and how they might reconcile their differences.

Unflinching and frequently hilarious, this book will speak to all women who have tried to make friends with their mothers.

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JANE CHRISTMAS is the author of several bestselling books, including What the Psychic told the Pilgrim, about her mid-life pilgrimage along Spain’s famed Camino trail; Incontinent on the Continent, about a six-week road trip through Italy with her elderly and opinionated mother in the hopes of finding a rapprochement in their relationship; as well as And Then There Were Nuns, which chronicles Jane’s discernment about entering religious life, and was a finalist for the 2014 Leacock Memorial Award for Humour. She has been published in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Germany. Born and raised in Canada, Jane Christmas is the mother of three wonderful adults and the ex-wife of two kind-hearted husbands. In 2012, she moved to the UK, where she lives in southwest England with her current husband.

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