YOU AND YOUR WIFE
SLICING, DICING, AND EATING UP ITALY
When you propose traveling to Italy for a sweeping, customized tour of the country’s kitchens, don’t tell your wife that she could really use the cooking lessons. It’s ungallant, unwise, and even a little uncouth, and if you don’t frame the idea just right, things could get ugly. Paint this picture for her: the two of you traveling from the country’s rolling hill towns to its coastal villages and spending a part of each day in the kitchen of a local cook, learning to prepare regional dishes. Sure, you’ll be “working”, but you’ll enjoy intimate meals eating what you cooked, and the recipes and skills you acquire will live on in your own home. Cooking Vacations International, a Boston-based outfit that plans culinary vacations, has a nine-day tour that begins on a working vineyard in Tuscany, where you’ll learn Florentine mainstays like tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms and pepolino, tiramisù, and Tuscan schiacciata all’uva cake with red grapes and rosemary. Then it’s south to Positano on the Amalfi Coast and recipes for Neapolitan pizza, handmade organic mozzarella, and artisanal pasta. From there, you’ll hop a ferry to Capri (pictured at left, top), where ravioli and other Caprese specialties await. When you’re not working the stove, you could go out to eat, hit up museums and shops, or relax with a bottle of wine. It’s a vacation, after all. Just don’t tell her she could use the lessons.
From $ 3,495 per person; cooking-vacations.com.