Joel Meyrowitz is one of the world's best-known and best-selling photographers; his Cape Light has become a color photography classic with 100,000 copies sold. The Tuscan countryside is among the most well-loved on earth, for its beauty, its natural bounty, its magnificent light. Award-winning photographer Joel Meyerowitz and novelist/playwright Maggie Barrett have combined talents to create a loving and personal portrait of Tuscany through the seasons. Meyerowitz provides the breathtaking images; Maggie Barrett offers poetic, evocative commentary that pays loving tribute to this alluring rural world. They take you inside everyday Tuscan life and landscape, and also capture the warmth of the people who live there and their profound connection to the land. Joel Meyerowitz, who has published 14 books, is a Guggenheim fellow and an NEA and an NEH award-winner. His photographs have shown in major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art. He was the only photographer granted access to Ground Zero, where he persistently captured both the devastation and the dedication of the many workers who toiled at the World Trade Center site. Maggie Barrett is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories. Her play, Give it Up, was performed off Broadway.

This archive of pictures is the only existing photographic record of Ground Zero after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001. Fenced off and classified as a crime scene, the area was closed to all photographers, and only scant information was available about the activities in the guarded enclosure that became known as "the forbidden city." Through sheer persistence involving almost daily acts of resourcefulness and defiance, Joel Meyerowitz became the sole photographer to have continued access to the site and describe its transformation over the next nine months from a place of total devastation to cleared bedrock. Published to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, this book serves not only as an elegy to the thousands who lost their lives, but also celebrates the tireless effort and bravery of the thousands of police officers, fire fighters, construction workers, engineers, and volunteers who assisted in the clean-up process.