Meet Mia LaRocca, beekeeper, cheesemaker, gardener and creative in Abruzzo

Also come join her beeswax workshop with us in December!

Today I want to introduce you to Mia LaRocca, one of the most interesting women working in food in Italy at the moment that I know — after every conversation with her I am filled with questions and inspiration! We first met at one of my workshops at Anna Tasca Lanza, that incredible hub for people who love cooking and who want to know the inner workings of Sicilian food — she was the gardener in residence.

I have learned so many things from Mia in the short time I have known her — I was fascinated by her enfleurage workshop that she held in the spring garden oasis of Anna Tasca Lanza (I wrote more about it here). We talked about food, about rebel women, about creative processes, bees, plants and ancestors.

I couldn’t wait to get her involved in a workshop in Enoteca Marilu so she can impart some of her knowledge to us all — so we have a One Day Beeswax Workshop in December, where we will make beeswax candles from a friend’s hive and do a honey and wine pairing over a cosy winter lunch, and we have also developed a fantastic longer workshop in May 2025 that will involve leather, enfleurage and wax fruits!

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy getting to know Mia and her journey from Ohio to her ancestral village in Abruzzo, which she now calls home and where she is building an artist residency named for her great-great-grandmother.

Mia at UNISG with her broccoli bouquet.

ED: You currently live in your grandfather’s house in a small town of 1000 people in Abruzzo — please tell us more about where you’re from originally and how you came to make this village your home.

ML: I grew up in the rural village of New Vienna, Ohio - so a small town setting is familiar to me. 

My parents married and left Detroit, Michigan, to plop themselves down as strangers in a monoculture farming community, three years later I entered the picture. My father’s side of the family is Italian and my mother’s Polish, which meant that even though they “left home” we spent as much time as possible away from Ohio to visit family right outside of Detroit and Coraopolis, Pennsylvania. 

I was about 3 years old, when my nonna (great-grandmother) came from Italy to live with my grandparents in Ohio. I was fascinated by this short woman dressed in black, who spoke a different language, always had something delicious cooking on the stove and told stories of this magical place she came from in the mountains of Abruzzo.

My nonna, Giovannina setteuarciate, was quite intimidating but I could not get enough of her. I would spend my weekends watching her knead dough, make soups, tend to pots of sauce, bake cookies, and shape meatballs all while she incessantly asked if we were hungry. 

As my high school graduation gift, my grandparents traveled with my sister and I to Italy for the first time. Finally I would get to see this far-out world that my nonna told me about. During that trip something inside me knew I would one day live in Italy, but I had no idea how. I feel like I have a lot of internal exploring to do here in Pacentro and that was evident from the start. We flew back to the United States and I couldn’t wait to tell my nonna how much I adored her home. 

I would go on to study Biological Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago the fall of 2014. As I was nearing the end of my time at University my nonna began to suffer from Alzehemier’s and dementia. At this time I learned about the Fulbright scholarship program and I chose to set my sights on an application in Italy. I researched the specific grant for The University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG) and made the decision to go for that one even though it felt a bit too dreamy to think I could somehow fold food into my career path. 

I remember showing my nonna the website for UNISG and explaining that I was going to apply for a grant to go to school there - we joked that Pollenzo had a castle just like Pacentro. She was one of the most devout Catholic women I knew so I asked her to pray for me because there was about a 3% chance I would win the Fulbright. I hit send on my application on September 12 and she passed away a few weeks later on October 2nd, 2017 at 96 years old. 

I won the Fulbright. I enrolled in the masters program at The University of Gastronomic Sciences. It changed the trajectory of my life. It is what ultimately led me to establish myself in Italy.  

I came to Pacentro during an ethnobotany class to write about olive tree pruning but instead found myself deep in a new cheesemaking reality. I learned to make cheese and began to live in my grandfather's home. Living in Pacentro gave me the opportunity to explore my own creative visions. It is a slow burn but I am finally opening my project, setteuarciate, to my community in 2025.  

Mia and her nonna making pasta

ED: I love hearing people’s origin stories, especially people who do something in food because I feel like there is always a back story! What is your background and how did you get into food?

ML: My origins definitely begin somewhere in the kitchen with my nonna. I was in no way aware that I could make a professional career for myself in food. The short version of my path is I trained to be a professional dancer and my family thought I would become a doctor, instead in my current iteration I dedicate my work to plants and pollinators.  

I feel like I cannot talk about my relationship to food without explaining my background in dance. I enrolled in dance classes at the age of 3 and dance was one of the biggest joys of my life because it gave me an outlet to express my emotions. Unfortunately, being in the dance world also forced me to scrutinize my body in ways that were less than loving. I developed an eating disorder and disguised it as vegetarianism. As I would read and learn more about food, my dietary restrictions would morph into more extreme versions of veganism and even raw veganism at one point. These were painful years between my nonna and I because she could not understand why I would not eat her food anymore. My nonna survived Nazi occupation in Pacentro and so she simply could not understand why I would choose to not eat meat, a staple that she worked so hard to be able to provide for her family.  

“These years of vegetarianism and veganism forced me into the kitchen alone for the first time because no one was going to prepare dishes that respected my narrow requests. By my sophomore year of University, I emerged from the fog of my disordered eating, totally sick of restricting myself for all of those years. I wanted to taste it all and heal my relationship to food.”

I was still under the impression that I would one day go to medical school and become a doctor. I was working with immigrant communities in a free health clinic and Chicago Public Schools. The thing I noted most was that when people do not have access to formal healthcare the one way they can care for themselves and their community is through food. I saw a parallel situation happening in Italy and that was my initial research focus when I arrived in Pollenzo. 

Here is where the whole story takes a turn. At UNISG, I finally met farmers, producers and artisans who were working with their hands. I was tired of writing, talking and philosophizing about issues in the food system and I wanted to actually participate in a tangible way. This is when I met Andrea Paternoster (above), a nomadic beekeeper, during our honey tasting course. I opened my first beehive with Andrea and I was mesmerized - I actually have the funniest picture of this moment. We decided I would work with him after I graduated. I never got the chance to work the beekeeping season with him because COVID lockdowns limited travel and he passed away unexpectedly. Life for me was so uncertain during the pandemic, I had my whole life ripped out from under me and I didn’t know if I would ever get the chance to return to Italy. I went to Los Angeles because I found an urban beekeeping job but I always kept the idea of starting my own project in Pacentro close to my heart. 

In LA I really got to sink deeper into defining my food practice – I had a lot of friends who are artists and they were my favorite audience to cook for after a long day of beekeeping. We would host the most fun gatherings with food at the center. People started to look towards me as a cook and ask me to cater small events. Growing up my family would go camping every summer and I enjoyed seeing these big meals cooked on open fire and in improvised kitchens. I am obsessed with cooking in outdoor settings or in minimal situations for a large number of people - I like the challenge and I got to do this a lot in California. I would also join my friends Dominic Santos and Lana Nichols to forage for these bewildering floral arrangements to accompany our meals and now I feel a table isn’t complete without flowers. I am still very much here in this world of how I cooked in LA. It was very playful and usually guided by following the ecology of a particular ingredient. 

I am excited to see how my practice evolves the longer that I stay in Pacentro. 

Uni is invasive in California and so when the season was right we made dinner on the beach and foraged for uni. 

ED: You are a woman who wears many hats, beekeeper, cheesemaker, gardener at Anna Tasca Lanza — do all of these different roles play into or influence each other and if so, how so?

ML: I find it funny to think of myself as a woman in food, but I am. For me all these different roles are clearly connected and in conversation, it feels impossible to separate one from the other. 

I know what informs each of my practices most are human and non-human relationships with plants. I am fascinated by all the intricate dances that bring food to the table. The ability to wear these different hats pushes me to explore different facets of the same element. It is actually one of the things I love the most about working in food. But sometimes, food is just food. I love this too, I can get lost in the beauty and controversy of something but at the end of the day we all still need to eat… you have to stop somewhere. 

I want to emphasize that for me, this element of being in a female body really holds all of these practices for me at once. In 2020 I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) and I wanted to learn how to care for my body. The plants I know and the food I make for others is informed by all the time I spend learning how to support my physical needs. Acupuncture helps me so much, and bees offer this medicine through stings at times.

“Milk and honey are food products that come from an understanding of the female reproductive system. I think we tend to obscure these facts and it reflects in our personal relationships to our bodies. I am always looking for ways to learn from the plants and bees – the process of cheesemaking also lends itself to these reflections. There is also always this undertone of migration in all my work and I think that will always be there, movement feels essential to what makes me Mia.”

I recognize the huge privilege that comes with being able to make a career out of tending to bees, plants and food. It is an honor to be with these rhythms and I notice how I feel supported in ways much more profound than simply earning a paycheck. It is hard work, but it is so rewarding. There is also a lot of grief and loss inherently in these roles. Beekeepers lose colonies to varroa, lambs die so that we can eat cheese and gardens are in constant flux of life and death. 

I came to the gardening residency at Anna Tasca Lanza to give myself the chance to work exclusively with gardening for the first time. The residency gave me time to work with plants for the sake of beauty, something I have never let myself do. The most unexpected thing about my time in the garden was that I experimented with scents through enfleurage. I still had an urge to teach and engage with people in the garden so I developed a weekly workshop where guests made a scent library with me. We made so many beautiful botanical perfumes with tomato leaves, jasmine and citrus blossoms. Now the practice feels ingrained into my daily life and I will continue offering enfleurage workshops. I am having so much fun planning our enfleurage workshop in May, we will peek into this ecology of perfume, leather, gardens, Catherine De Medici and Chianina cows. 

I finished my gardening residency at the beginning of November and now I am back in Pacentro getting ready to work in a garden of my own. 

Enfleurage with Mia at Anna Tasca Lanza

ED: Your website has an interesting name, setteuarciate — I’d love for you to talk more about what this means to you?

ML: Setteuarciate is a family nickname, given to my great-great-grandmother, Marianinna. In the Pacentrano dialect it means seven armfuls - a unit of measurement for the amount of things one could hold in their arms. If you walk through Pacentro with me, you will hear people introduce me as Mia setteuarciate because it is passed down through my female lineage.

“Each family nickname in Pacentro has a story behind it, people no longer can tell me exactly how she earned the nickname 7 armfuls but it stuck.”

We all assume it has something to do with abundance or generosity, the ability to hold a lot of things at once. My great-great-grandmother once opened a small puteca (shop) where she traded olive oil and wine and everyone believes she got the nickname during this time. Her puteca was run out of the same cantina space that I am now opening as a physical manifestation of setteuarciate. There is still writing on the wall that shows record keeping for her wine fermentation and who they sold a pig to in 1928.  

I wanted to name my project setteuarciate because I love language. I think dialects are incredibly important and as we know they are almost all on a crash course to extinction because less people speak and learn these languages. For me the name perfectly encapsulates what I am exploring here in Pacentro – women relating to themselves and the surrounding landscape. I like to interpret the nickname to be 7 hugs sometimes because I hope the idea of love and generosity shine through my work – hugs are so soothing to the nervous system. 

ED: What does 2025 look like for you and do you have any fun projects you are looking forward to?

2025 is ambitious, a lot of change. I am going to start tending to my own beehives in Pacentro and inaugurate my physical space in the cantina to offer workshops. Setteuarciate will open as an artist residency so that I can host others that would like to deepen their practice or exhibit work in Pacentro. I will slowly add new workshops to my offering so that I can enter into this conversation of creating practices that allow us to participate in the rhythms of daily life. We will look at the ecology of mulberries, silk, bees and beeswax to name a few. Actually, I would love to invite you to Pacentro to cook together during zolle season - Sulmona is known for its red garlic and in July we pick and preserve the garlic scapes to ensure that the garlic bulb grows nice and large instead of sending its energy up to the flower. 

I finally - fingers crossed - think I can start tending to a garden across the street from my cantina space. Of course I will be foraging a lot of plant material and continuing enfleurage - I want to host a few workshops around certain blooms in the mountain - specifically ginestra [broom]. We have our enfleurage workshop together in May which feels like such a nice way to celebrate our meeting in the garden of Anna Tasca Lanza. I have a few other dream collaborations I will cultivate in 2025 so check my calendar regularly for any updates. 

ED: Favourite things to cook, or favourite ingredients to cook with?

ML: My favorite thing to cook is broth, specifically bone broth. I always have a broth bag in the freezer with my kitchen scraps. I think a homemade broth really makes all the difference and is the perfect thing even just for sipping. I got really tuned into finding mushrooms and I find great pleasure in cooking with them – morels and chicken of the woods are my two go to mushrooms when the time is right. 

Mustard! I love mustard so much, Dijon mustard is divine. I also love to incorporate beans, stinging nettles, colatura di alici and dark chocolate in my recipes - certainly not all together and in no particular order.

I believe it is so empowering to cook intuitively and listen to the cravings my body shares with me. Cravings give us so much good information if we learn to recognize and work with them. 

This absolutely feels very American of me to admit but I love breakfast. Breakfast is my non-negotiable. 

For me the biggest luxury in life is having access to raw milk and good butter. My family and I have an obsession with ice cream – my dad and I share a dream of opening an ice cream shop together. Maybe we will get there one day because when I first came to Pacentro I tested so many gelato recipes with goat milk, really quite a challenge! I think lemon (really any citrus) and bay leaf are essential ingredients and so fun because they work in both sweet and savory dishes. I do have to say that after seven months in Sicily, anchovies and oregano are now kitchen essentials for me too. 

Pacentro, Abruzzo

ED: What do you love about where you live? Any recommendations for people visiting Abruzzo?

ML: I love waking up to the mountain every morning. I love that Abruzzo and the people living here are defined as “forte e gentile” – strong and kind. I love the produce market in Sulmona. I love that women generally run the show –  life in Pacentro is convivial and the community extends a warm welcome. I love how much creative potential I feel here. 

“Abruzzo is wild. I recommend coming by train, the views are stunning and the pace is slow. I sometimes hesitate to share recommendations only because I think part of Abruzzo’s charm is that it is not a tourist trap. There are people here working mindfully to ensure it does not become a sort of Disneyland and I think that is important. Finding the balance between dignity for local residents and creating practices that allow for visitors to meaningfully participate in the rhythms of daily life.”

That being said, here is my offering to anyone that is interested in deepening their idea of what Abruzzo is, was and can be. I also just published a substack article about my version of Abruzzo.

• Grotte di Stiffe - I still cannot stop thinking about the underground world in these caves, go during the heat of summer if you need to cool off.

• Rito pane  - this project is the distillation of Abruzzo that I was hoping to participate in when I decided to move here in 2019, I am so happy Claire and Dan are dedicating their gifts to Abruzzo. They also host a monthly market called Rurale.

• Alla Casa Vecchia - where I learned to make cheese, please just stop by to witness it for yourself.

• Lago di Scanno - I love that Abruzzo is shaped by both mountain and sea, but I will be the first to admit we are not known for our beaches. Instead go to this freshwater lake that is in the shape of a heart. 

• Trabocchi - structures that fishermen used on the coast of Pescara, they look impossible but somehow a few are full restaurants with fixed menus. Go here if you want to eat an ungodly amount of fish.

• Ristorante L’Elisir del Poeta - you absolutely need a reservation, then be prepared to be in one of the most intimate and vegetarian meals of your life, eating here for the first time is one of my favorite food memories.

These can be anchor points for a visit but do leave ample space for the unexpected. 

Mia’s Cantina in Pacentro before a small renovation

Fig tree peeking out of garden outside of Mia’s cantina. 

Thank you Mia, for sharing your story and your knowledge! Keep in touch with Mia on her substack and her website.

Please come join us on December 15 for a beautiful, creative day making beeswax candles and a wine an honey pairing with lunch.

In May 2025, Mia and I will be offering a workshop to show you the ancient art of Enfleurage — we will be capturing the scent of the Tuscan spring by making our own solid perfumes, we will connect the dots with artisan perfumery and leather makers in Florence and even mimic enfleurage in the kitchen with truffles. More info here.