Favourites from Puglia to Venice to Modena to Sicily

Plus workshops for 2025!

As you read this, I’ll be on my way to Cala Molinella in the beautiful Gargano peninsula in Puglia for a cooking workshop. I have been on the road for most of the past six weeks or so. Spring is such a great time to be traveling in Italy, after all. The weather can be unpredictable but it’s not as hot as the summer months and that is a blessing when you are moving around and doing a lot of walking, carrying bags or visiting producers and farms etc.

I’ve been from head to toe of the peninsula lately: From Puglia to Venice to Modena to Sicily to Umbria in that relatively short time (and home in between those trips to change over my carry on with clean clothes!) and now back to Puglia. Below I’ve shared some of the lovely memories/eats I’ve gathered on the way.

First of all, I truly love traveling around Italy and savouring the different regions, the incredibly diverse landscapes and architecture, the unique traditions, even the way the character and habits of people change along with their accents (or dialects!). In one short train trip it’s like you are visiting another country.

It’ reminds me of what Mario Pei (Italian American linguist and professor) wrote in 1950 about diversity being the spice of life and Italy having endless spice. He also noted this:

“The countries that display the widest range of dialects are also the ones in which cookery assumes the most diversified forms; while the lands where dialectal differences are slight exhibit a certain monotony in their food. Italy appears very close to the top of the list among countries with a wide dialectal array, and correspondingly, the food of Italy is so diversified that the cuisine of one region is practically foreign to another.”

I think that’s really what makes traveling through Italy so endlessly exciting and appealing. Here are some of the things I’ve loved on these recent trips:

• The cute town of Collazzone, Umbria, above, which is like going into a time machine, for a slow weekend away, tasting wine at Agri Segretum and catching up with friends. Also ceramic hunting in the town of Deruta, where we also gobbled up plates of thick strands of strangozzi in wild boar sauce.

• A vaporetto taken out on the Venetian lagoon to Mazzorbo island for a quiet, romantic lunch in the vineyard at Venissa’s Osteria Contemperanea (the low key sister eatery to their Michelin-starred restaurant) of a spicy blue crab spaghetti that vaguely reminded me of Pad Thai (I’ll come back to blue crabs sometime as it’s a topic I really want to talk more about soon) and an incredibly creamy risotto with raw oysters and lagoon herbs, below — the perfect lunch date.

  

  

• The flea market of Cisternino in Puglia’s Valle d’Itria, every 3rd Sunday of the month in a big carpark at the bottom of town, brimming with beautiful ceramics, above, is worth planning a trip around (and making sure you have some extra space in your luggage). I would have nursed that large speckled bowl on my lap (it would have taken up all the space I had) if Ryanair wasn’t so picky about cabin luggage.

• Discovering that in Venice bees take the vaporetto to the outer islands to find flowers (still mind blown) and that the herbs and flowers of Venice’s barene (salt marshes, more about their importance here) produce a very special honey that Venetians whisk up when it comes out in the summer (try the one by Savino from I&S Farms but be quick, it sells out in a day) and also an exquisite Grappa Ducale.

• Tette di monache (nun’s tits!) in Taranto. Sounds like a ridiculous tongue twister. But seriously, these are incredible and I really have to figure out how to make them. Soft and pale sponge-like texture, almost like a squishy meringue, filled with softly whipped cream. We had divine versions of this pastry at Baroné in Taranto that were as light as a feather.

• The elegant and beautiful city of Modena is an absolute joy to visit and spend a few days in (especially when taken around by Massimo Bottura, who I had to interview a few weeks ago for the BBC World Service documentary In the Studio — it will come out in August, stay tuned!). Life-changing sandwiches at tiny Bar Schiavoni by the market (I had the bottarga, spinach and smoked buffalo mozzarella panino) and cappuccino with zabaione (“Emilians love their eggs,” explained Lara Gilmore, Massimo’s wife, with a shrug). Still swooning over the zabaione (and the whole experience of course, but I’ll share more on this later). The whole trip — only 3 days — made me want to spend much more time in Modena.

• Cute Baroon bistro for lunch in the ceramic town of Polizzi Generosa (below the cappuccino) in the heart of Sicily, high in the scenic and impressive Madonie mountains after a visit to Ceramica d’Angelo. Baroon has great antipasti like caponata with apples (eggplants are not yet in season and this variation was so, so good), the town’s famous, extremely hearty bean and pasta soup followed by a slice of sfoglio — a 17th century cake invented by nuns of Polizzi Generosa made of fresh tuma cheese, cinnamon and chocolate — for dessert.

I’ll be staying put for the next month after this Puglia trip before heading to London for some GOHAN supper club events this summer (save the dates! July 22 with Honey & Co and July 31 at Fortnum & Mason) and then you’ll find me hopefully laying low at home.

Workshop news

Our workshops are sold out this year but we do still have our regular Market Day Cooking Classes on most Tuesdays (see the calendar here) and one of Marco’s fabulous wine classes on June 21. And this new workshop has just been released — Culinary Tuscany with Stellavision travel! Read all about this dreamy Fall trip here.

My annual Lagoon Workshop in Venice will be happening next spring, dates will be released very soon! In the meantime, here is the itinerary of last spring to give you an idea.

Anna Tasca Lanza, Sicily, Spring Harvest Workshop: 19-24 May 2025

All the workshops we will have in 2025 in San Miniato at Enoteca Marilu have just been released (dates below), you can read more about them here.

• Artichoke workshop, San Miniato: 7-12 April

• Midsummer workshop, San Miniato: 23-27 June

• Summer harvest workshop, San Miniato: 7-12 July

• Wine harvest workshop, San Miniato September 8-13

• Autumn workshop, San Miniato: 13-17 October

• White Truffle workshop, San Miniato: 18-22 November

I’m also looking into a culinary workshop in Japan for late 2025 that would involve things like miso making and tofu making in the mountains, staying in a traditional Japanese farmhouse and relaxing in the hot springs. Would you be interested?

Photo above by Jules Wilson-Haines of Willow Creative, at our market class.

Links & recs

This article on our classes in the Sydney Morning Herald/Good Food Australia (also my focaccia with olives recipe and 12 other cooking schools around the world!).

An old piece from 2022 but one I really enjoyed on Single Subject Cookbooks by

Nic Miller

— are you also a fan of these kind of cookbooks?

Hetty Lui McKinnon

yuzu miso asparagus tart is still inspiring me to try to make this year round with different seasonal vegetables now that asparagus are on their way out.

Jamie Mackay

who writes The Week in Italy newsletter is who I turn to to understand Italian politics and what is happening in an always-great read that shines a light through the otherwise murky (and depressing) news. In this piece he discusses the pro-Palestinian Florentine student encampment in Piazza San Marco and how Patrizia Nanz, the President of the European University Institute in Florence, is backing, being inspired by and meeting their demands.

Tending Gardens is a really beautiful, quiet newsletter from a tiny village in rural Japan about simple living, seasonality and traditions.

Just finished reading The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza and really enjoyed it (especially as I read it while in Sicily!). Now I need another summer book. Anyone have any other good recommendations for books that weave Italian history/family/women’s stories together?