Author Evenings

Paula Butturini presents her memoir Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food and Healing in Italy.

About Paula Butturini

Paula Butturini and her husband, John, met in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But less than a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred from their Italian paradise to Warsaw and while reporting on an uprising in Romania, John was shot and nearly killed by sniper fire. Although he recovered from his physical wounds in less than a year, the process of healing had just begun. Unable to regain his equilibrium, he sank into a depression that reverberated throughout their relationship.

Paula began to reconsider all of her previous assumptions about healing. She discovered that sometimes patience can be a vice, anger a virtue. And she rediscovered the importance of the most fundamental of human rituals: the daily sharing of food around the family table.

Keeping the Feast is an account of one couple's triumph over tragedy and illness, and a celebration of the simple rituals of life, even during the worst life crises.

Read an interview with Paula from the blog, Purple State of Mind.