I work as a commercial photographer in London and I have next to no experience in professional cooking or background in food history.
the luckiest foodie kid in the world
Growing up, I was lucky enough to be able to stare at the view above every summer of my childhood. It's from my grandmother's house in Italy, looking towards Camogli and Portofino Mountain, on the Riviera to the East of Genova. Portofino itself and the Cinque Terre are a little further down the coast. On holiday in Italy, everyone cooked, from my grandmother to my aunts and all of my uncles. It sounds sugary and syrupy but that's honestly how it was - focaccia on the beach, after dinner strolls for gelato, decades of family reunions and every single hello and goodbye with any close relative and friend I can think of - all with food in common. My food core memory? Aged 3, I managed to get lost and separated from my parents on a crowded Tuscan beach. The beach pizza seller found me and delivered me, crying, back to my distraught ma and pa. Today, if I smell melted mozzarella and tomatoes and especially capers, I'm back stumbling across the scalding sand. Wondering if I'm going to grow up a pizza foundling; hazy memories of the parents I once had but yearning to become a pizza seller just like my stepfather and his father before him. But you see, food saved me. It brought me back so I can bring you this today.
but seriously
Given my back story, there was absolutely no escaping me discovering food and cooking sooner or later, at my home in Cardiff, South Wales and on holiday every year in Italy. While a lot of the Ligurian approach to food feels instinctive and the 'proper' way to cook to me (they have the world's best focaccia, the One True Pesto and region is the birthplace of many unique pasta shapes and traditions) my own cooking influences are down to my family roots and history - which I can trace through northern and central Tuscany to Rome.
let's thank fascism
And now an unsettling thought. You and I probably have Benito Mussolini to thank for making this cookbook possible. In 1939, my grandfather Guido Andreani was running a business importing Italian marble in South London. Inconveniently, 1939 was also the year that Mussolini chose to follow Hitler and declare war on Britain. Guido duely received a polite letter from the British government asking him if, as a newly designated enemy alien, he wouldn't mind either returning to Italy, or joining other suspicious foreign types on the Isle of Man for the duration of the war. Unsurprisingly, the family made the decision to return to Italy and, with their London business and house now frozen as 'enemy assets', the family settled in Rome. There my grandfather worked first as an accountant and then as a translator of English language films at Cinecittà in Rome, before returning to his work as a marble merchant and finally setting in Genova in the 1950s. That's where my grandparents lived for the rest of their lives and that's where all my childhood family holidays began. Often chaotic adventures between Genova, Pisa, Carrara and Livorno; always unforgettable. And none of it would have been possible if it hadn't been for that clown Mussolini. So that's what we have to thank Facism for.
