The Culinary Experience

From my kitchen to some of our favorite tables in Tuscany.

My kitchen is where I spend most of my time. It’s where I cook for family and friends, experiment with new recipes, and enjoy simple, seasonal food.

It’s not a cooking school. It’s my home, and it’s where I’ll welcome you during your stay in Tuscany.

Just outside the kitchen door, I grow herbs and vegetables. Before our cooking classes, we’ll step outside together and pick what’s fresh and ready that day.

Together, we’ll prepare some of my favorite Italian dishes from scratch, from handmade pasta to traditional desserts.

We’ll also share meals at some of our favorite restaurants, places we’ve loved for years.

After our time together, you’ll return home with delicious recipes, wonderful memories, and the confidence to recreate these dishes for the people you love.

Here’s a little glimpse of one of our cooking classes.

A pasta class in my kitchen

Arnaud filmed a few moments while we were making fresh pasta together.

How I learned, and how I teach

From my childhood in Naples to my farmhouse kitchen in Tuscany.

I didn’t learn to cook in a culinary school. I learned at home, like many Italian women, growing up in a traditional family.

I grew up in Naples, where the kitchen was always the heart of family life. For more than fifty years, our family had a wonderful nanny named Lina. She cooked lunch and dinner every day using simple, seasonal ingredients, never measuring anything and always tasting as she cooked.

Looking back, I realize she taught me much more than recipes. She taught me the flavors I still look for today. She taught me that everyday cooking begins with good ingredients and simple techniques, and that food is always better when it’s shared with the people around your table.

I later studied architecture, not cooking. But after restoring our Tuscan farmhouse, my passion for food became my life’s work. For more than twenty years, I’ve been welcoming travelers into my kitchen, sharing the recipes, traditions, and way of cooking that have been part of my life since childhood.

When you cook with me, you’re not attending a formal lesson. You’re simply spending time in my kitchen, cooking together the way I do every day.

Testimonials

Welcome to my kitchen.

This is the kitchen I designed when we restored our Tuscan farmhouse. I even drove to Carrara to choose the marble slab for the countertops. It’s where I cook every day, and where I’ll welcome you.

Our first cooking class takes place on the evening you arrive. Together we’ll prepare a Tuscan dinner, then gather around our farmhouse table to enjoy the meal and get to know each other.

For our second class, we’ll make fresh handmade pasta from scratch, along with a seasonal sauce and a traditional Italian dessert. If the weather is nice, we’ll enjoy lunch under the shade of our beautiful old oak tree.

These are hands-on Italian cooking classes. You’ll take part in every step, using family recipes, fresh seasonal ingredients, and enjoying wonderful Super Tuscan wines.

As we cook, I’ll share the tips, stories, and traditions I’ve learned from my family and still use every day in my own kitchen.

My Vegetable Garden

Gardening is my other passion.

Besides cooking, there’s one place you’ll almost always find me: my vegetable garden. I love growing our own food. To me, picking a ripe tomato in summer or a handful of fresh basil just before cooking is one of life’s simple luxuries.

Before each cooking class, we’ll take a walk through the vegetable and herb garden to see what’s in season and pick a few ingredients to bring back to the kitchen.

We’ll also cook with our own extra virgin olive oil. Every year we harvest the olives from the trees surrounding our farmhouse and produce the oil ourselves. It’s one of the staple in my everyday cooking.

And when you visit, I’ll tell you the story of how we transformed this piece of land into the garden where I now spend so much of my time.

The restaurants we eat at

Across the week, you eat seven meals with us.

Plus five breakfasts on the hotel terrace. The restaurants are chosen carefully, the same way we choose the wineries.

On Day 2, lunch is at our favorite seafood restaurant on the Mediterranean — the meal where Arnaud and I quietly pay our own bill, because we want to be at this table with you as friends, not as hosts. That same evening, we eat at the wine shop in Bolgheri where the locals go.

On Day 4, lunch is at the cheese farm. The farewell dinner is at the elegant restaurant owned by the Tenuta San Guido family — the family that makes Sassicaia. Each meal is a piece of the same week. None of them is generic.

The producers we know by name

Every cheese, every olive oil, every spice.

It comes from someone we have known for years. Rita Salvadori at Peperita, who grows chillies the slow way and whose products you will taste during the week. The cheese family in the hills who have been making pecorino their grandfather’s way for decades, and whose children we have watched grow up. The baker in Castagneto who refuses to modernize. The coffee roaster who will explain to you what real Italian espresso is.

We have chosen each one for two reasons: the quality of what they make, and the way they treat the land and the people who work it. Almost all of them are organic. Some are biodynamic. None of them are chosen because they pay us a fee. We pay them, the way you would, because their work is worth what they ask.

What changes in your kitchen at home

The first time you cook again, something is different.

You reach for olive oil more readily. You taste the sauce three times. You use less of everything. You remember a herb.

We have had guests send us photographs of pasta they have made years later, in their own kitchens, in their own countries. Some of those guests come back. Some have never been able to eat supermarket pasta the same way again. Both are good outcomes.

A few cooking questions

I am not an experienced cook. Will I keep up?

You will. I teach beginners every season, and they do beautifully. I teach by feel and by demonstration. There are no surprise tests. Experienced cooks usually find that they un-learn a few things and learn a few new ones — which they tell me afterward is more useful than they expected.

What if I have dietary restrictions or allergies?

We accommodate most dietary needs with advance notice. Italian cuisine naturally offers excellent vegetarian options, and I work closely with our restaurant partners on other requirements — gluten-free, dairy-free, allergies. Tell me on the call. We will make sure you eat beautifully.

Will I get the recipes to take home?

Yes. After the week, I will send you a small set of recipes from what we cooked together, written in my own words, so you can cook these dishes at home. They are not exhaustive — Lina herself never wrote her recipes down, and she taught me by feel — but they will give you the spine of each dish.

Have other questions? See the full FAQ — or write to me directly. The real conversation is the call.

Write to Chicca — let’s set up a call

A presto, Chicca