When I was a girl, my zia Elvira married a man from up in Valle d’Aosta, near the mountains where the cows graze so high you’d swear they were nibbling clouds. Every Christmas she would come down to us with…

When I was a girl, autumn meant one thing in our corner of Friuli: the cows came down from the high pastures of Carnia, and with them came the wheels of Montasio my zio Beppi traded for polenta flour and…

Up in the mountains of Alto Adige, my cousin Hermine married a man from a valley so far north the church bells rang in German, and the first winter I visited her I understood why her kitchen smelled nothing like…

In our house, Easter did not truly begin until the cima was on the table, wrapped in its cloth and cooling on the marble counter where my Nonna Fiore kept her cheeses. She learned it from her mother in a…

My mother’s sister, Zia Pina, married a man from Bologna, and every August we would pile into the car and drive north to visit her red-roofed kitchen that always smelled of butter and broth. It was there, standing on a…

When I was a girl in a village outside Vicenza, Friday nights belonged to my Zia Teresa’s kitchen, where a blackened terracotta pot sat on the lowest flame from morning until the church bells rang for evening Mass. Inside, pale…

In Milano, Sunday lunch was never rushed, and my Zia Elvira’s kitchen smelled of butter and wine from ten in the morning. She kept a copper pot just for ossobuco, dented on one side from a fall down her tiny…

When I was a girl in Milano, the feast of Sant’Ambrogio every December meant only one thing in our house: my grandmother dragging out the heavy old pan, blackened with fifty years of butter, and pounding veal chops on the…

In Piemonte, autumn arrives first in the nose — damp earth, woodsmoke, and the deep purple smell of Nebbiolo grapes being pressed in every cortile. It was on Saturday nights like this that my mother would carry the good terracotta…