Pino often has quite a jaunt to bid on stone restoration work in distant sites. If I’m not booked for a tour on the day he’s headed to an area I’ve never seen, I go “along for the ride”…….and the wonders. I joined in gladly when he headed to Magliano de’ Marsi, Abruzzo mountain town…
Enroute to a wedding celebration near Reggello, south of Florence, we stopped for an espresso in a whisper of a town along the winding road skirting vineyards and olive groves, Cascia di Reggello. A towering bellower flanked a medieval church graced with a Romanesque portico and we headed over to explore: what a gem, that…
When the Shea family joined me to cook up Umbria, we started with peaches: we needed to get our peach tiramisu for dessert chilled. [lcaption]All the family unites on our tiramisu with peaches[/lcaption] [lcaption]Erin, Marty and Mari unite on the tiramisu detail[/lcaption] Our pasta sauce came next: il sugo del contadino (“pasta sauce the way…
That indomitable Giuseppa cooked up a rural feast for our small group the day after a culinary tour-de-force: she’d cooked a muti-course rural lunch for more than twenty-five who’d helped her and husband, Paolo and son Loris with their vendemmia (grape harvest). She’d roasted their homegrown chickens, pork shanks, and veal in their stone wood-burning…
Now Andrea and her papa’ Edoardo – from Sao Paolo Brazil – feel they’ve truly come to know Italy. As Signor Edoardo told me, “I feel I only know a country if i can know the people” and meeting our farm friends fulfilled Edoardo’s goal – and beyond what he had imagined. Our “Rural Life…
How to bring light to a rainy September day? Cook up Umbrian goodness with me in our Assisi farmhouse. Patricia and Robert, good to have you wish us and enjoy taking home those Umbrian flavors to St. Louis! Plan on making that bandiera? Here’s your recipe. [lcaption]Patricia’s quite sure our bandiera is ready[/lcaption] Mille grazie,…
The ash-gray jagged mountain peaks backdropping Tagliacozzo accent the pastel palette of this Abruzzo town’s elegant neo-Renaissance palazzi. Encircling the main piazza’s fountain with obelisk in the center, the graceful multi-leveled buildings offer a chromatic palette ranging from a pale lemon yellow to peach to brick pink to rich ochre. Dark green or deep brown…
July and August are the months for that pasta dish PIno’s mother, Signora Vincenza, taught me. This Sicilian eggplant pasta dish is a hit with our Umbrian friends, too. Do enjoy Signora Vincenza’s Pasta alle Melanzane (for 4 – 6 persons) Ingredients: 4 – 6 medium-sized eggplants Extra-virgin olive oil, q. b. (“quanto basta” or…
We’d been to Pisa years ago when our children were small. I can’t even remember if we explored much more than Piazza dei Miracoli. Yes, that “Piazza of the Miracles” is certainly something miraculous and Pisa’s glory. But this university town hides many treasures as we discovered thanks to Andrea, young doctor and son of…
As our ferry pulled out of Portoferraio, port city of Elba, I thought about those few days we’d had there on this glorious island and they seemed condensed to just fleeting, pleasurable moments. Across the harbor, a clipper ship was anchored just below the fortress. I wondered where it was from and how long the…