Carla is one of the leading writers in the world on Italian food and wine. She was born in New York and grew up in Paris and London, and for the past 16 years, she has lived and worked in Italy. Her books and articles show the extensive research that she has done on Italian restaurants, winemakers, and food producers and vendors. Her book The Food Lover’s Companion to Tuscany, published in 1996, provided helpful and detailed information on the region’s artisan food and winemakers. Now available is her latest book, The Food and Wine Guide to Naples and Campania. As she did so well with her Tuscan book, Carla methodically guides the reader through all the provinces and towns where one can find notable restaurants, wineries, food shops, and the artisan food producers themselves in order to plan a memorable culinary experience. She is always reliable in giving an insightful explanation of what appeals to her about a particular producer or location.
Carla frequently writes for Bon Appétit and Decanter magazines. She also offers food tours and cooking classes.
I interviewed Carla on February 22, 2006, in Florence at the Chianti Classico Consortium’s annual wine preview event. We discussed her latest book and her career.
Joe Pascale: So how does it feel after finishing this three-year project?
Carla Capalbo: A big relief actually. To do a project like that is amazingly complex. It’s also very, very solitary. It’s like traveling a little bit like a gypsy, I would say. Nomadic anyway, traveling from one place to another. Living in different areas to do the research basically.
JP: When was the book released?
CC: It was actually printed last April, but it really was only presented in the States in the fall.
JP: Has there been enough time to get an idea of how the response to the book has been?
CC: Well, I just came back from New York this week and we finally did a press lunch there for it. Some people who are in the field already knew about it. But it hasn’t had that much publicity yet in America although it’s had a bit more in England, but basically it’s been tremendously well received. It’s already won a prize of the Gourmand, which is a French award and it’s won the best in its category and now it will go up for the finals against all the other best recipe books that are in the competition. I’ve also entered it in quite a few different competitions. So we’ll see.
JP: You received a lot of encouragement from various people in the region of Campania, particularly Alfonso Iaccarino. Was there a particular moment when you decided that you would write this book?
CC: The way the book came around was a rather unusual way. What happened was Alfonso and I were on a jury together about seven or eight years ago. I gave him – we had never met before – a copy of my Tuscan book. His English is sketchy, but he realized right away that it was a very in-depth and very personal book. He said what we in the south need is somebody like you to come here and explore our territory because everybody always writes about Tuscany in the north, but nobody yet has bothered yet to come down here. And I said it would be very difficult to find a publisher, British or American, who could finance anything like that because it’s not a well-known region and Campania doesn’t even have a very high image or profile because the word itself gets confused with campagna, which means countryside. If you say Naples, Amalfi Coast, or Capri, everybody goes, “Oh yeah, I love it. It’s wonderful.” But in fact, most people don’t have a clear idea in their mind even of where Campania is.
I said it’s going to be terribly hard to sell something that people can’t even really identify. And he said, well, I think it would be so important to do this book that, actually, perhaps we can try and raise the money within the region itself as part of its own promotional development. And I sort of thought to myself oh yeah, yeah, we’ve heard this before. So I said we’ll keep our ideas open and left it at that.
Six month later, he called me up and said I haven’t forgotten. Six months later, I haven’t forgotten. It went on like this for almost three years of I haven’t forgotten, I haven’t forgotten. Then finally, I guess about four years ago at Vinitaly, Alfonso’s son, Ernesto, called and said look, could you come and meet somebody very important because we really finally want to get that project on the road and I thought, my goodness, it’s really happening.
So I met the then-Agricultural Assessore of the Region of Campania. Nobody knows what an Assessore is, but I sort of see it more as a minister. So let’s say the Campanian minister of agriculture who was an extraordinary man. What was so interesting about this man, Vittorio Aita, is that he said the whole issue is we want someone like you who is a well-known, professional writer of food and wine and recognized as such abroad to give credibility to the region by doing the book themselves in their own language and with a foreign publisher. They did not want an Italian publisher. My brief was to find a publisher and, of course, I had worked with a wonderful publisher, Alexander Fyjis-Walker at Pallas Athene, in England before and so he agreed to do it with me, which was great.
JP: After you finished the book, has promoting the book been more important on the Italian end or English speaking end?
CC: The fact is, as you know, so many books these days unfortunately come out even with an American publisher and there is no provision for PR spending. And if you don’t have PR, you’re just one of seven hundred million books that come out and it’s unbelievably difficult to gather any kind of momentum by yourself. Unfortunately, had this man remained the minister, then we would have done promotions all over the place because he, of course, saw the point of promoting it. It wasn’t for his own glory. It was for the glory of Campania itself especially because the book has turned out the way it has turned out. But I’ve been battling with those in the region now who don’t see overall benefit of promoting a book about their region.
But what’s interesting, just now – and we’re in February 2006 – I’ve come back from New York because I have found somebody in Campania who is also another sort of division of the region who knew me before, who is not dependent on the new minister, and who said, look, this book is fantastic and we have to do something with it. So I’ve just come back from the first sort of official press lunch that we did in New York and we’re doing another one in April. So finally now – but it’s taken me nine months of knocking on all these different doors just so the book wouldn’t get abandoned.
So the issue was, with Alfonso’s help, I met Aita, who was working for the governor, who is still the governor of the region, Antonio Bassolino who is fantastic. And they decided to underwrite the book and it was all up to me. I had to do everything. I also had to find the publisher. They sort of said you take the ball and run with it and do it however you want.
I was also very lucky because I had initially thought – as you know the book has over 350 color photos that I took – and initially I think my publisher thought we’ll have maybe 40 to 50 photos in the book. And when about six months before we started the final rush to print, he said perhaps you could come over to London with the photographs and go through them. I said look, I’d have to hire a special plane. I’ve got a room full of slides because I’m not at all in the digital era yet. I said I think it’s simpler if you get the plane and come down to Naples.
He was so knocked out by the pictures. He said we have to redesign the whole idea of this book even if it costs more to produce it and we’ll make less money. I want to be sure that we put in as many pictures as we can and that’s why he redesigned it with that little margin with the little pictures. So we got in dozens more that way. In fact, I think you would probably agree, that the pictures show a side of Campania that really nobody’s ever seen before.
JP: I’m sure you knew a lot about Campanian cuisine before you started writing this book.
CC: Actually, I didn’t know much at all. It was really a question of them charming me into coming down there and doing the work. I mean, sure, I’d been to the Amalfi Coast a couple of times and I knew about the mozzarella and the pizza a little bit, but in fact, when you start a book like this, you have to assume basically you know nothing because it’s so complex.
JP: So during the three years, were you constantly discovering something new?
CC: Absolutely, and in order to do it, the region is, as are all these regions, quite spread out. But also there in particular it’s very diverse landscape and so –
JP: – and it’s quite dramatic landscape as well.
CC: There are dramatic changes in it. Let’s just say that. So sort of in the way I did the book on Tuscany, I spent at least two and a half years really moving every few months to another area. As it is, I drove literally tens of thousands of kilometers to do it. I spent five months at one point living in a fishing village on the Amalfi Coast in the winter that was not at all a touristy thing. Then I lived inland in Irpinia in the mountains which might as well have been a totally different world. Different foods, different wines, a different way of life to really try to live it from the inside.
JP: Your book shows the depth of Campanian cuisine and its importance in comparison with the other cuisines of the other regions of Italy. Although Campanian cuisine is relatively unknown in the States, are you finding that Americans are beginning to pay more attention to this region?
CC: Yes, I do. Actually, if you sort of scratch around a little bit in America, it turns out that there is quite a large contingency of Campanian Americans who left Campania. It was a very poor area, as was all the south, and it tended to be large families. This was before the First World War. The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
JP: That’s when my grandfather left Avellino.
CC: Right, and mine as well. All my grandparents left at that time. In fact, there’s just been less identity about what Campanian food was. But when you actually start to look at what it is, pasta was born in Campania. Tomato sauce was practically born in Campania too, once it came to Italy. Pizza. Then things like mozzarella and the use of vegetables and so on. Actually there are quite a lot of things from Campania that we do recognize as Italian American food.
JP: Is the healthier aspect of the food in Campania something that people are paying attention to?
CC: Oh, I think so because the Mediterranean diet really was formed in southern Italy, not in northern Italy. Northern Italy is so much more famous in so many ways because it has had more industry, it’s had people who were somehow more outward looking than perhaps the southerners. Also even within Italy itself, the south has always been pushed down. There are still political parties that would like to literally take a saw and saw the bottom of the boot right off. Financially and in every other way.
So it’s hardly surprising that the southerners haven’t really been able to have a strong voice until recently. But actually, this is again an area of extraordinarily healthy food because Campania produces and always has produced more fresh vegetables. Even for the ancient Romans, it was their vegetable garden and their wheat growing area out of Sicily and Puglia. The Mediterranean diet which is based, not on animal fat, but on olive oil, vegetables, fish, and pasta, is still held, by some people anyway, to be one of the healthiest diets in the world.
JP: Were there any particular subjects that were dear to you that didn’t make it into the book?
CC: No, I pushed – I mean the book got longer and longer and longer because I couldn’t bear to leave anybody out. I mean, of course, if I had more time, I would have included more people. But I don’t think I can say that there is any one subject that I left out. I could add more about other wineries. I could add more about other producers or other restaurants and so on. You could go on forever adding. That’s one of the tough things about doing these books. Indeed, with the Tuscan book, when I finally handed in that manuscript, it was something like – it was ridiculous – 40,000 words too long. And the publisher said oh that’s easy, just chop off a couple of provinces or something and I said you must be kidding. I went through the whole book with a toothcomb and just took out a sentence or two from every single entry just to make sure everybody stayed in. Because these are not just place names. These are people who I spent time with who have been generous and opened up everything, their pantries, their ideas, their photograph books –
JP: How can you cut that?
CC: You can’t. You couldn’t let somebody down like that.
JP: Doing your own photography, you mentioned that it turned into a vast amount of photos. Were they any other challenges in doing your own photography?
CC: I’ve always loved to take pictures, but until the last few years, I haven’t ever considered myself, in a way, professional enough to do it. I think actually what first started me realizing that I could do it was when Decanter magazine, who I write for a lot, commissions an article, they also put out the word that if you have any photographs, let’s have a look, we may or may not take them. The first time I worked for them which was about five or six years ago, I did an article and they said do you have any photographs and I said oh yes I do, when in fact I didn’t, but I spent the money from the article going to the place – it was actually Bologna – and taking some pictures.
I thought I might as well try it. In fact, they loved the photographs and they said oh, this is great. Any other time, they said they’re always receptive to your photos. And I thought, oh well, then this might mean that it’s worth doing it myself. So I began. I had worked a lot in the visual side of life before. I was a sculptor for many years and then I was an art history major. I also worked as a food and prop stylist in New York in advertising and editorial for six years. So I’m used to working with my eyes. It’s just that I have no technique in particular. Technologically, I’m way behind. I’m using an old manual Nikon camera, a fabulous old camera from the 1970s. It’s quite heavy, but I don’t have anything modern. As you see, all the photos in the book are exteriors because I don’t have lights. I’m not equipped to do interiors basically so I’ve just avoided them.
JP: Digital would help you in that area as I’ve found out.
CC: Yes, it probably would. That’s right.
JP: You wrote the book in memory of Luigi Veronelli. Who was he?
CC: He was an extraordinary person and he died just as the book was being completed. I felt he had been somebody who seemed to me had been such an inspirational person for the whole food and wine world in Italy. He was really the first person to value, even thirty, forty years ago, Italian cuisine. He started taking seriously all the little producers, the particular character of so many different Italian wines and food when here nobody was really valuing that. He was way ahead of his time.
JP: What was he doing exactly?
CC: He wrote. He set up all sorts of things – magazines, books. He was one of the key people in the history of Italian cuisine. Right to the end of his life – by then, he was practically blind – but even so, he went everywhere. But I remember when I first met him about eight or nine years ago. Of course, he couldn’t see terribly well. I addressed him with the polite form (Lei), and he said, no, no, no, we journalists, it’s always the familiar (tu) form. He was very left wing and believed we were all fighting for the same battle and that there should be no hierarchy between us.
He was an extraordinarily receptive person. Very strong voice. He wasn’t afraid of situations sometimes quite heavy politically or other situations where he would just get up and say no, this is the bottom line. He spoke the truth, really. And he affected everybody who has worked in the trade. He got older and less radical in his old age. He also set up Veronelli Printing, the publishing side of things, the Veronelli guides, the magazines, he was everywhere, on TV, on the radio. He was way ahead. He was the first real food and wine writer in Italy.
JP: Do you think Italian restaurants in the States could do more to highlight Campanian food and wine?
CC: I do. I think also the wines, as we know, have really come up a lot. The interesting thing about Campanian cuisine is that it’s so much more varied than just the idea of everything with red sauce on it when, in fact, you discover, like everywhere else in Italy, every little province or part of a province has its own – not only does it have its own recipe – but also its own ingredients which is what’s so fascinating. You go and live in the mountainous area where I live at the moment in Irpinia – I’m living in a tiny little medieval village at nine hundred meters in the center of this amazingly hilly area.
JP: That’s the village Nusco?
CC: Yes, that’s Nusco on the Appenines, what I like to think of as the backbone of Italy which runs all the way down the boot. We’ve had snow even though we’re south of Naples practically all winter.
JP: One time I drove into that snow. It was raining in Rome, but then after I passed Naples and headed over to Avellino, all of a sudden, a heavy snow started.
CC: You start going up the mountains. Yeah. And the mountains are quite formidable down there. And that means, of course, you’re living with people who, even though they were very poor, what was important to them was the maiale and the whole issue of killing the pig in the winter to have the fats, all those things. The cured meats and the cheeses are still being made, many of them, most of them, luckily, with animals that are out to pasture. Most of the cheeses are still being made from unpasteurized raw milk. Very important. And all the vegetables. Where I am, the hills are filled with black truffles and, in fact, they get sent up to Umbria, Tuscany, and even Piemonte and being sold off as from those regions.
JP: I’m going to mention a few items in your book that I thought were interesting surprises.
CC: Okay.
JP: Saffron-rice gelato.
CC: Ah-hah!
JP: Never heard of that before. That sounds interesting.
CC: Right.
JP: Beer jelly.
CC: Mm-hmm.
JP: The yogurteria in Paesum-Capaccio.
CC: That’s fantastic. That’s the buffalo mozzarella place. The real thing there is that it is really – that’s what I like to speak of as a model farm. We’re talking about La Tenuta Vannulo. That really is an illuminated man, Antonio Palmieri, who has invested to make a farm.
First of all, it’s just so beautiful to visit. You can visit the whole farm. You can see the young calves and the way they’re fed. You can see the older buffalo and how they keep them very clean because he uses raw milk and it’s a fresh cheese. They have to be very, very sure that the animals’ milk is very clean so he’s worked out ways of doing this. Then he’s used the buffalo milk, not only to make mozzarella which is of course fantastic, but also to make the yogurt and also ice cream which is absolutely out of this world.
You can go down there in this lovely little café on the farm. You can go in and have a big bowl of ice cream or the little yogurts you can buy in pots and have them to take out. It’s wonderful. And he’s built the cheese making dairy with a huge plate glass window outside so that people can come all morning if you want to and stand there and watch through a glass window in a beautiful sunlit room as the people make the mozzarella. You see them pulling it and doing all the other steps just four feet away from you through a piece of glass. You see everything. You see it all. It’s brilliant. You learn so much that way.
JP: Montevetrano, the wine that Robert Parker has called “the Sassicaia of the south.”
CC: Silvia Imparato, I am glad to say, has become one of my closest friends down there. She’s an extraordinary woman and someone with a huge culturally visual background because she was a great photographer and really didn’t need to make wine at all and became evermore interested in wine and eventually she thought, I have this farm down in the country and if I do make a wine there, I want to make one of the best wines in the world, otherwise I’m not really interested in doing it. How she managed to pull it off is amazing, but she did. It’s quite extraordinary.
JP: How forward-looking the winemakers are came across so well in your book.
CC: Exactly. Down there, that’s particularly important because there is still a very traditionalist side of life that is a bit less forward thinking.
JP: Here’s a non-food and wine related subject I liked that you mentioned in the book. Torella dei Lombardi in Irpinia, the birthplace of Italian Western director Sergio Leone.
CC: Right and there is the film festival that they have down there.
JP: When is it?
CC: I think it’s in the summer time.
JP: I enjoyed your chapter on Avellino and Irpinia because that’s where my grandfather was born.
CC: And that’s where I’m living too. It’s pretty. No one’s ever written eighty pages about Irpinia before.
JP: I can still remember that Monteforte was the first place I had buffalo mozzarella.
CC: Mmmmmm. Right. And it’s so different, isn’t it, from anything that one might think mozzarella is? You know the other thing that’s worth knowing about buffalo mozzarella, or any mozzarella really, if you can get the real thing is they say – I was shocked about this, I had never thought about it – you must never refrigerate it. That’s because it toughens up. It’s perfect if you keep it in the liquid that they sell it to you in which, in their case, is sterilized. It keeps the texture from seizing up and becoming hard and rubbery, which of course, makes us realize that all the mozzarella we’re eating everywhere else in the world is rubber.
JP: Was there a reason why you chose Nusco as your base?
CC: There was as a matter of fact. That was when I went to go live in Irpinia and I needed a base that would give me the possibility of traveling easily to all the villages around. I really wasn’t sure where to go. I looked first in Avellino. And then I discovered this brilliant young chef, Antonio Pisaniello, was about to open a restaurant in Nusco and I had met him before. I thought he was very interesting. He’s self-taught. I’m very keen on young self-taught chefs because I think it’s a category of people who are doing it because basically it’s the only thing in the world they really, really, really want to do and they’re doing it against the odds. And often it means that they have – what the Italians would say – that they have one extra year. Or else they really wouldn’t be able to compete or set themselves up and he definitely fits into that category.
I think he’s extraordinarily talented. He works so well with the local ingredients and the memory of the traditional recipes, but he always manages to modernize them in a way that’s not contrived. You close your eyes and you’re still eating the traditional dish, but he’s taken out three quarters of the oil or he’s lightened them and made them much more for today’s palate without changing them. It’s really great. He works with all the local ingredients.
And so he was very kind and realized that I needed somewhere to stay for a while and he offered me a room in the village. And so I moved there. In fact, even though I’m not living in that flat anymore, I am still living in Nusco because I fell in love with the area and the people. It’s a tiny little medieval village. It’s very beautifully preserved even though the whole area was tremendously badly hit in 1980 by one of the worst earthquakes of the south or any part of Italy has ever known. And they’re still reeling from it in many ways. But this particular village is quite unique.
JP: Where were you living in Italy before you moved down to Campania?
CC: I own a house in Piemonte on Lago Maggiore which is a thousand kilometers from where I’m living and working at the moment. So it’s very sad, but I rarely get back to my own house. It just takes too long. It’s very expensive to go up and down. It’s a one-and-a-half-days drive or could even be a two-day drive. And then you need a day to recover. You’re looking at a week at least just to get up there and come back, and I just haven’t had the time. Before that, I had been living in Tuscany a lot to write my book on Tuscany.
JP: Olive oil. You mentioned that most Americans still do not understand the variety in flavors of olive oils throughout Italy.
CC: Yes.
JP: I would even add that there are many Italians that still don’t know this either.
CC: Oh, I think that’s true.
JP: What will it take to educate them on this? I’ve heard several people in the last few years who are very interested in getting this point across, yet this lack of understanding still prevails. What is it going to take to educate people to understand and appreciate olive oil better?
CC: I think it depends a lot on you and me and people like us. We have to keep hammering away at explaining patiently what the issue really is. First of all, olive oil is extraordinarily healthy when it’s been processed as simply as possible, i.e., basically just crushed. You have to think of it almost as a fruit juice. It is a fruit juice. You don’t want to sterilize it or pasteurize it or add chemicals to it or any of the other things. You have the possibility of just crushing it and there are different ways of doing that, but ultimately that’s the thing. And the oil that comes from that is so much healthier than many of these other seed and grain oils that have been processed at very high temperatures in huge chemical plants.
The real problem is, as we know, labeling is not always very clear so what you can do to protect yourself or to try and get really good oil is to go to small producers who don’t have big chemical bottling plants in their farms. They’re hand picking the olives and they’re pressing them in time. The whole issue of cold pressing is relative. It actually isn’t that cold, but it’s not very high temperature. I think cold is kind of a misnomer in many ways.
Then at that point, if you can get those oils, as you know, there are many different varieties of olives. Each area of Italy – we’re so lucky we live here – has different ones. An oil from Chianti or Montalcino is totally different from a Ligurian oil or a Sicilian oil. Many of them have just fantastic characters and Campania is lucky to have several different areas with really excellent oils.
JP: The Campanian oils tend not to be as hot and spicy as the Tuscan oils.
CC: No, they tend not to be partly because of the varietals that they use and partly because it’s a hotter climate down there. The spicy or fiery Tuscan oils – the ones that I love – often come from the higher ground a little bit more inland where the olive trees are experiencing more of a winter. Down in Campania, many of them are grown quite near the sea, although there is a variety, it has quite an interesting character, called Ravece, which is only really grown in Irpinia. It’s practically unknown, but they’re just beginning to discover it now.
JP: You discuss the different liqueurs of Campania. Dessert wines and spirits just haven’t penetrated into the American food culture. Do you think this still might happen?
CC: Yes, I think so. It’s obviously going to start in the places that are privy to the culture and the liqueurs and dessert wines themselves. You think of something like a Passito di Pantelleria or Vinsanto. Although Vinsanto became popular for dunking cookies into it. Personally, I think that’s silly. I think if you dunk an egg biscuit into any wine, it not only alters the wine, but also your palate. I don’t like it. However, Vinsanto is quite well known. But Campania doesn’t make dessert wines so much although they are trying.
Really what they do so brilliantly there is the limoncello which has quite a solid following. Limoncello is strangely more popular than some of the dessert wines. Also this walnut liqueur is quite fun, the nocello, which is great. If Americans could get that at Christmas time, a little bottle of it. It’s a spiced liqueur. You don’t want to drink it in huge quantities, but it’s absolutely lovely at the end of a nice winter meal or for the holiday season. It goes brilliantly with those kinds of winter desserts or afterwards with company in front of a nice fire. It’s absolutely artisan. I’m very good friends with the man who makes it. He would love for anybody who wants to come and see the harvesting of the walnuts in June. They always do it on the day of San Giovanni. It’s just a fantastic celebration of the rustic contadino life.
JP: Your discussion of pastries reminded me of a pastry shop in Monteforte (Avellino). I remember that the pastries there seemed more like the Italian pastries you’d find in a place like Cliffside Park, New Jersey, than the types of pastries you see in Tuscany. Is that an accurate observation?
CC: That’s interesting. In a way, you’re probably right. I think all the southern Italians between the Sicilians and the Campanians who left and who took that sort of sweet tooth with them and these are pastries that come from a whole other extraction. There was the Arab influence which was incredibly strong in both Sicily and worked its way up the southern part of Italy. So there are fantastic things with honey with the citrus because, of course, it was the Arabs who brought citrus fruit to Sicily first. Also sorbets and the way of making sorbets and the way of keeping the lemon and orange groves alive. It’s very interesting. There’s a whole culture there. Having the ricotta creams in the pastry – all of that still has an exotic feel, at least to my palate. It always reminds me exotic faraway places. There’s a very, very rich palate, portfolio, or cornucopia of southern pastries. Definitely.
JP: The chapter on Naples is definitely an essential part of your book. The city, however, does not have a good reputation as far as personal security. I just want to ask you one question on this. What would you advise those who have that perception of Naples?
CC: I think Naples is one of the most exciting cities in Italy. One of the most rich and complex. You can find everything there from architecture to art to just the people, the way of life. The street life, everything. All you have to do is leave your valuables at home and walk freely. If you go down there with a huge five thousand dollar wristwatch on, then you’re tempting fate. You would be in many other cities of the world too, but you can’t risk that in Naples. But if you go there with your Swatch watch on or your money tucked into your money purse inside your belt or whatever and you don’t have a terribly expensive camera – you just don’t want to flash your wealth around there – and then you’ll be perfectly safe. No one will ever touch you, but they have some very good pickpockets there.
JP: Even if you’re spotted as a tourist?
CC: They’re never going to mug you in the sense that they’re not going to be violent toward you. But if they see something for them easy to steal like a wristwatch or a wallet out of your pocket, they’ll go for it. But they’ll do it and you probably wouldn’t even notice it. I have met people who have been robbed of watches and wallets in Naples and didn’t even know it until they got home that night and didn’t have them anymore. You just have to learn to be careful and you’ll have a wonderful time.
JP: Your book, The Food Lover’s Campanion to Tuscany, came out in 1998. What do you think is that state of Tuscan cuisine over the last decade?
CC: I still spend a certain amount of time in Tuscany. Not as much as I did then, but I don’t really feel that there has been any kind of negative change. There’s more of, let’s say, a turnover here. Certainly Florence is slightly more of a cosmopolitan city, still quite provincial, but a city anyway, and things tend to change more. So a restaurant there five years ago may not be there now because someone else has taken over. Whereas often as we know in the rural parts of Italy, a little family-run trattoria is unlikely to have changed hands because it’s been in the family for a long time and unless there’s been some radical change in the family it’s still there. What I love about Tuscan food are the rustic dishes. The soups, the things you don’t get in other places, the cheeses like pecorino. So I like the simple food in Tuscany is what I suppose I’m saying. There are some great restaurants that cook more refined foods and they are excellent, but you don’t go there every day. The pleasure of coming into Florence and going into a little trattoria and having a wonderful bowl of farro soup, you long for it, you look forward to it. Or a plate of those beans cooked in the fiasco.
JP: You were born in New York?
CC: Yes, I was born in Greenwich Village because my father was a director in the theater and my mother was a ballet dancer with George Balanchine in the New York City Ballet. Then my mother, my brother, and I moved to Paris when I was six, lived there for two years and then we moved back to New York for another two years. Then we moved pretty definitively to London because my mother remarried in London. I was nine by then. So I went through all my formal education in London. By then, I had learned French, of course. But from the age of nine, I was in British schools and I went to university in England as well.
JP: Did you move to Italy from London?
CC: No, after university, I worked in publishing a bit. Then I rebelled against all that and decided to go back to art school in London. So then I became a sculptor. I went through many years of working as a waitress at night to pay for going to graduate school in sculpture and then I was a freelance sculptor. But at a certain point, I realized it was incredibly difficult – we were freezing to death. We couldn’t afford to heat our studios in winter. It was a bit of a struggle.
So I decided I would go and rediscover New York which after all was my hometown and yet I really didn’t know well. I mean, I never lived there as an adult. I used to go back to see my father on some of the holidays. I kept in touch with the city, but I hadn’t tried to work there as a grownup apart from a university holiday or whatever. So I moved to New York, but I decided that I had to try to find something to do that was both visual and yet a bit more commercial.
Somehow I stumbled into becoming a stylist for a photographer. That’s basically the person who chooses all the things you see in the picture, arranges them, if it’s food, cooks the food, but may, as in my case, also choose the plates, the knife, the fork, all the things that set the mood of a photograph. It’s really quite a specific skilled job.
JP: What brought you to Italy sixteen years ago?
CC: I was still doing that job. I had been in New York for six years, but I felt too homesick for Europe. I had pretty much decided that I was going to move to Paris when I fell in love with an Italian and moved to Italy. We were together for a long time, we’re not together anymore, but for the first ten years we stayed together. So I lived up in the north in Milan and Lago Maggiore because he was a designer and I worked quite a lot with him as well.
JP: Can you say at this point what projects you have in mind for the future?
CC: Let’s just say that there are other regions that are interested, but I’m not sure that I could face going through another guidebook of this kind. It really is three years out of your life where you have no home base anymore, you’re away from your friends, you’re away from your family, you’re away from everybody pretty much. It’s very, very isolating. And the real thing about this is that it requires so much constant energy because it’s not like making a friend at a winery and then saying oh, great well next week, now I know that person, I can go back and see them again. You have to keep moving on and I’ve gotten rather tired of that part of it. I mean, I love the discovery, but I’m also exhausted by it.
I really want to do some writing projects that still have to do with going out and discovering, but maybe at a slower pace where I have more time to spend with those people. It’s just the sheer volume of these guidebooks where you’re writing about 700 to 800 places. It’s very stressful. I do a lot of journalism which is wonderful and I have more time again now to get back to that. I write for Decanter magazine a lot. I’m writing a piece at the moment for Fine Wine magazine. I’m writing for The Independent in London. I write for Bon Appétit. There are a lot of incidentals that come up. And that’s enjoyable because you can go off to a place for a week and do the research and then it’s over. It’s not like three years. It’s quite a big difference.
JP: So for now, you’ll continue to live in Campania?
CC: Yes, I certainly will. I like the idea of keeping a base in the north and a base in the south. I often sometimes do tours with people, Americans or other people who want to come and maybe do a few gastronomic days with me.
JP: How do people find out about your tours?
CC: I usually do custom tours. In the past, I used to do slightly more structured ones. But at the moment because my schedule changes so much, I’m doing more custom tours. If somebody wants to come, they can contact me through my email address. If the timing works out, then we can put something together.
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