Ask Me Anything

This week's dispatch from the road. Plus, I take your questions on food and cooking, travel, tourism, broken ankles...you ask, I'll answer.

Ready for your questions…Illustration y Daniela Bracco

Quick tour update: The Spring 2025 tour of Liguria and Emilia-Romagna is sold out. BUT, two spots have opened up for my Fall culinary 2024 tour of Piemonte and Liguria. This is going to be a delicious tour, with a focus on the Langhe area of Piemonte, Genoa, and lesser-traveled parts of the Italian Riviera. You can read more about it here.

To those who have expressed interest in the May 2025 Food Writers in Piemonte workshop with Kathy Gunst and me, we will be sending out an update and finalized itinerary this week. If you are interested in learning more but have not yet sent me an email, please reach out at domenica@domenicacooks.com.

This week’s newsletter features highlights (and a lowlight) from my visit to Tuscany last week, followed by something a little different: an Ask Me Anything segment. Type a question in the comments and I will answer it.

Click here to browse through the newsletter archive. If you’re looking for a particular recipe, you’ll find all Buona Domenica recipes—160 and counting—indexed here, ready to download and print—a function for paid subscribers. Although many recipes are initially free when I publish them here, they do go behind a paywall after a few weeks.

If you are able to do so, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber. And don’t forget to click on the little heart icon at the top left. This one small gesture helps to spread the word about Buona Domenica. Grazie!

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A sunflower field a couple of miles outside of Penne, Abruzzo

I’m back in Penne after another week on the road. This trip took me to Tuscany, with work-related visits to Pistoia, Prato, Lucca, Siena, and a few other towns. Pistoia, by the way, is a charming, walkable medieval city that seems (at least to me) somewhat less crowded than other, more famous Tuscan towns. It is also apparently where Italy buys its Christmas trees, as the outskirts of the city are populated with nursery after nursery growing suspiciously triangular-looking pines and evergreens.

A few of the dishes set out by Giulia and Tommaso for lunch

The highlight? A stop in Colle di Val d’Elsa, where I had lunch with my friend and fellow cookbook author/Substacker

Giulia Scarpaleggia

and her photographer husband,

Tommaso Galli

. Bruschette, fresh sliced tomatoes topped with tuna sauce, slow-cooked green beans, and other summery dishes graced the table, and what a treat it was to spend a couple of hours catching up with friends I don’t get to see often enough in real life.

The lowlight? I feel slightly uncomfortable writing this, but: Lucca. The city was clogged with visitors—who can blame them?—and in the time since my last visit eight or 10 years ago, chain stores have replaced many of the local shops in the historic center. In 1990, when I visited Lucca for the first time, with my parents, the number of churches—100—outnumbered the tourists. The place was truly a fairy tale town, with its medieval architecture, vaulted alleyways, and its perfectly oval amphitheater piazza, ringed with gold and custard-colored buildings—the piazza was not yet filled in with umbrellas and café tables back then. And, the cherry on top of this golden cake: Lucca’s outermost fortress wall—actually a broad, tree-lined boulevard encircling the centro storico, which you could walk or bike atop while peering into the heart of the city.

Lucca is still magnificent, and you can still walk or bike along that boulevard, and the city will no doubt outlast the lot of us. At least I hope it will! But more and more there seems to be a creeping, flat sameness, a superficial mall-like quality about these places so affected by mass tourism.

Biggest surprise? Montecatini Terme, famous for centuries for its thermal baths. I’ve been curious about this town for decades, but always figured it would be out of my price range as a vacation destination. The other day I took the exit off the autostrada, just to have a look-see. What I found was not what I expected. Once a place that attracted the likes of Coco Chanel, Sophia Loren, and Audrey Hepburn, Montecatini had a forlorn Grey Gardens decay and bygone era vibe about it. It reminded me of Saratoga Springs, with a dash of Charleston and Key West, and Cape May, N.J.

Terme Excelsior, one of the now-shuttered thermal baths in Montecatini Terme

Quite a few of the spectacular Liberty-era spas and hotels appeared to be closed, their grounds surrendering to vines and weeds. It was only after chatting with a shop keeper that I learned that all but two of the thermal baths had been shuttered over the last couple of decades due to financial problems. It is, apparently, a long, complicated saga involving the region of Tuscany, bank loan defaults, and halted renovations, a situation I don’t know enough about to offer any perspective (this piece in the Corriere della Sera gets into it for those who can read and understand Italian).

I remembered an old magazine ad by the Borghese cosmetics company: a woman with her hair wrapped up in a towel, her face coated in a mask of mud from the renowned Terme di Montecatini. Sometimes it seems like it’s feast or famine with Italian towns. I thought of my own adopted city, Penne, whose centro storico has lost many of its residents and whose main street is sprinkled with empty storefronts. Many other hill and mountain towns in Abruzzo and other regions have suffered similar, or worse, fates. Penne, at least, is anchored by a hospital and by two luxury clothiers: Brioni, which has been producing hand-stitched suits since 1959; and Brunello Cuccinelli, which is slated to open a manufacturing facility in early 2025. It’s a city of 12,000 or so residents, so there is plenty of vitality, but the fact remains that the historic center is downcast. There is lots of earthquake-related reconstruction work going on at the moment, and cranes are everywhere, so I’ll be curious to see where it all leads.

What is the answer? I surely don’t know, though I am trying to become more informed. I’ve just bought a book called I Paesi Invisibili: Manifesto sentimentale e politico per salvare i borghi d’Italia (The Invisible Towns: Sentimental and Political Manfiesto to Save the Villages of Italy), by Anna Rizzo. I hope to find some insights within its pages.

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Got Questions?

I may not be able to solve Italy’s current tourism and population issues, but I can certainly try to answer your questions.

So…what would you like to know? Feel free to ask me about food and cooking, cookbooks, recipes, travel, what I’m reading, what I’m listening to, and more. Click on the button below and leave your question a comment. I will answer.

I’ll start by telling you what I WISH I was watching but can’t because I don’t have a TV here in Penne. And no, it’s not season 3 of The Bear. It’s Wimbledon. Forza Jannik!

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PICTURE ITALY: Lucca, 2024

Madonna & child, Luca della Robbia, Chiesa di San Michele in Foro

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Thanks, as always, for reading, commenting, subscribing, and sharing.

Alla prossima,
Domenica