Italian home cooking

If you look at a map of Italy, you may be surprised to realise that almost half of the country is made up of peaks and mountain ridges. The Val Comino belongs to this lesser-known and still relatively unspoilt Italy: a green and rugged, territory where Lazio, Abruzzo and Molise meet. This pie is a …

  January 2026: I have just made this delicious cake-pudding again and … oh boy! it is good. I do invite you to try it because you are for a treat. The book it comes from is, by the way, one of the best books on Italian regional cooking – do check it out.  Well, …

December 2025 “Oh! What a dreadful illness hunger is!” exclaims Pinocchio in the fifth chapter of his adventures. At the beginning of the chapter we find the wooden puppet desperate from the pangs of hunger, finally aware of how hard it is to be alone in the world, without a family. Suddenly, however, his troubles …

Faraona arrosto ripiena con castagne e patate (Roasted boned guinea fowl with chestnuts and potatoes)

Last novembre, on a cold sunny day, we drove from Lucca into the Garfagnana region, to catch the woods in their autumnal splendour, before winter settled in.Sillico was our destination: a minuscule, picture-perfect village, perched 700 meters above sea level on the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, surrounded by chestnut woodland. Only about one hundred people live here …