In just a couple of days, we bought the gifts that were missing and we simply decorated the house with my little seven year old juniper tree, a few baubles, stings of lights and a nativity scene. It's incredible how quickly a few lights and the smell of a juniper…
A few days to Christmas, to a new year, and it feels like everything happened suddenly, as I was not expecting the holidays, the celebrations, the frenzy of shops bustling with people, a menu to decide, ingredients to buy at the market and at the butcher. Have you ever been…
This is the last post for this year, written during those days in a bubble I love so much, those days when Christmas has already passed, when you still have the taste of icing sugar and panforte spices on your lips. If you turn around, Christmas is already hidden, wrapped in…
Christmas at home is a postcard. Each one has a role, as in a theatrical operetta: everyone has his lines or his stage costumes. There have been the same smells for decades, the chicken liver crostini and the spices of panforte hovering from mid-December to the Epiphany on the 6th…
I was born in the countryside of Colle Val d'Elsa, in between Siena and Florence. The sea is only an hour away as the crow flies: on a windy summer day I can almost smell the brackish air carried by the breeze. Yet fish rarely appears in our traditional cuisine.…
Today I'm sitting in the living room, right in front of the wood-burning stove: finally the cold weather has arrived. I'm not used to stay still anymore, so I immediately seek a source of heat: a cup of steaming black tea, a wool blanket, the roaring fire. We spent the…
Yesterday I photographed until five in the afternoon, until the light outside allowed me to see something on the set. When I looked up from my computer, I suddenly found myself in such a dark kitchen that I could hardly tell apart the shape of the tripod that stood out…
This year the Christmas countdown, the never ending checklists, the holly that stings me every time I take it in the wrong way, the songs you have to listen to and the movies you have to watch otherwise it is not Christmas are stressing me out. I've always embodied a…