About

We are Luca and Nataly. We live in Rome and we cook Italian food, mostly the classics, mostly the ones people outside Italy have heard of and get slightly wrong. This site is where we write down what we have learned about making them.

What we do here

We pick a dish, we cook it, and we write the page around the parts that recipes usually leave out: where the method fails, why it works when it works, and what an Italian would say if they watched you do it differently. The quantities matter, but the quantities are the easy part and every site has them.

Where a dish comes from Pellegrino Artusi, who published La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene in 1891 and then spent thirty years revising it because readers kept writing to tell him what he had got wrong, we say so and give his recipe number. Where it does not, we say where it does come from. We rewrite in our own words; we do not reproduce his text, which is freely available and does not need us to repeat it.

Alongside the recipes there is At the table, about eating in Italian restaurants as a foreign visitor. How a menu is built, what to order when, what the coperto is. That section exists because it is the part we can tell you from living here rather than from reading.

One rule we will not break

We will never tell you to substitute an ingredient. The right ingredient is part of what the dish is, and a site that suggests pancetta instead of guanciale has told every Italian reader that it does not know what it is talking about. Where something is genuinely hard to find, we will say what the dish becomes without it and call that honestly by a different name.

What this site is and is not

The selection of dishes, the structure of the pages and the opinions in them are ours. We write about cooking, and cooking is a practical craft where kitchens, ingredients and equipment differ. Nothing here is professional advice of any kind, and the terms set out what the site does and does not undertake.

Photographs are credited beside each image and listed in full on the credits page. Where an image was made with a generative model, the credit says so.

How corrections work

Errors get fixed on evidence. If a source shows a page is wrong, the page is amended and the change is dated. Nothing is removed on a hunch or on a single broken link. If you think something here is wrong, write and say why.

How this site is funded

This site carries no advertising and no sponsored content.

Write to us at no-reply-spam@example.invalidlegal-web@toor.it.