“Not everyone in Italy may know how to cook, but nearly everyone knows how to eat. Eating in Italy is one more manifestation of the Italian's age-old gift of making art out of life.”

Marcella Hazan

“What’s your favorite place you’ve ever traveled?” It’s a question we all ask each other. And everyone invariably says they can’t choose — every place is so different. Which is true. How can you compare Dubai to Iceland to Toledo, Ohio? But if I really had to choose, and it’s not necessarily the place I want to live, but if I had to choose the place I loved traveling to the most, it would be Italy. After a quick stop in London for high tea at Harrods, as you do, we landed in Italy, found our tiny rooftop apartment late at night, and searched out the only pizza place in the neighborhood that was open. From there it was nonstop eating and drinking, all of it pure pleasure. We ate gelato at least twice a day in order to find our favorite (the cinnamon gelato in a warm cone at Gelateria Edoardo in Florence). We had a seemingly endless number of negronis, including a negroni in the bar where the negroni was invented. We had truffle bruschetta and cacio e pepe in the Trastavere, pastries outside the Colosseum, and refreshing white wine and seafood on the beach in the Cinque Terre. We learned how to make pasta on a friendly Italian man’s balcony while his wife, who had just had a baby, boiled it up and served us homemade tiramisu. We spent Halloween night touring the catacombs and then tracking down an old bottle of banana liqueur from a dusty liquor store for my Dad. We biked through Tuscany, starting early in the morning at a monastery hidden in the fog where we had a pine liqueur made by the monks, and stopping at a winery and limoncello producer on the way down. It was all delicious, unpretentious, and I couldn’t stop saying “grazie!” for weeks after the trip.