by Joseph Harris Kathleen books our trips, and she books them the way other people compose music. The Italy trip was the smoothest I have ever taken, trains that met us, hotels that expected us, and regions that unfolded in the right order. Woven through all that competence were her surprises, which she plants like landmines of delight and detonates without warning. There were two on that trip. The second went off later, in Rimini, when our hotel turned out to be Fellini's Gr

by Joseph Harris Every cook I've known has a blind spot on the map, and for most of my life mine sat in the top right corner of Italy. I could tell you what they eat in every region from the Alps to the toe, I've now cooked my way through nearly all of them on Tuesday nights in this dining room, but Friuli stayed a rumor. Then I started reading, and I found the oldest reversal in the country, Friuli is not some outpost of Venice. Friuli is Venice's mother. Aquileia, on the Fr

by Joseph Harris There is a joke in Italy, and it has been running for twenty years without losing a step: Il Molise non esiste. Molise does not exist. It is on the t-shirts, in the memes, in a mock documentary that treated the region the way other films treat the moon landing. The premise is always the same. No one has ever met anyone from Molise. The photographs are staged. The maps print a shape between Abruzzo and Puglia to keep the coastline from looking broken. It is th

by Joseph Harris Nine thousand years ago, somebody dug a home into the soft rock above a ravine in the instep of the Italian boot, and people have been living there ever since. Matera is the oldest continuously inhabited city in Europe and one of the oldest on earth, older than Rome by most of recorded time, older than Jerusalem. Its two cave districts, the Sassi, climb the walls of the gravina like a honeycomb stood on end: houses carved into the rock and built out of it, on

by Joseph Harris Italy has a spine. The Apennines run down the middle of the peninsula from the Alps nearly to Sicily, and every region along the way is having its own relationship with those mountains. In the north the relationship is about snow and dumplings. In the south it is about stone and scarcity and peppers drying on strings. The climate changes, the dialect changes, the story changes, but it is always the mountains doing the talking. If you want to understand Italia

by Joseph Harris After Athens, Rome is the father of us all. Everything that follows is the evidence. The law. The language, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and the Latin that runs underneath English like a subterranean river. The calendar. The concept of the republic, which San Marino borrowed and the United States studied. The roads, some of which are still in use. The aqueducts. The architectural vocabulary that every public building in Washington DC is s

by Joseph Harris They call Umbria the green heart of Italy. It is the only region without a coastline, without a border with another country. It has been turned inward for a very long time — on itself, on its hills, on its olives and lentils and truffles and the particular quality of its light. What that produces, after centuries of looking inward, is a people who are completely themselves. Not performing for anyone. Not adjusted for export. Just entirely, quietly, powerfully

by Joseph Harris On San Marino, a very stubborn stonemason, priest-strangling pasta, and a small area of Los Angeles that would absolutely secede if it could. Questions Asked While Driving Past the Turnoff What is San Marino really? The oldest republic on earth. Founded in 301 AD by a Christian stonemason named Marinus who climbed a mountain to escape Roman persecution and apparently never came down. It has been a sovereign republic ever since. Seventeen hundred years. The Un

On Michael, the chili, and the Italian-American kitchen that got credited to the wrong region for a hundred years by Joe Harris This was before the Godfather. I want to establish that clearly, because it matters. The year was around 1967. Before Coppola gave America a mythology to attach to Italian men with friends in interesting places, before anyone had a script for what to call what they were seeing, I had Michael. The real version. I was about fourteen, in junior high sch

by Joseph Harris When you understand what food synergy is, everything changes. The idea is simple and almost impossible to teach: flavor is greater than the sum of its parts. The right ingredients in exactly the right proportions create something that cannot be achieved with a recipe. It must be tasted and adjusted until it is just right. It requires an educated palate, experience, skill, and above all the concept — the understanding that you are not following instructions bu

by Joseph Harris Most of the regions in our journals arrived through travel — a trip, a meal, a market, a kitchen in someone else's country where something clicked into place. Piedmont arrived differently. Piedmont did not wait for me to go there. It sent people instead. Three of them, to be precise. Three men connected to the hills of the Langhe, to the Nebbiolo grape, to the serious and uncompromising wine culture of northwestern Italy, who found their way to Mendocino Coun

by Joseph Harris There is a food show in Italy called Cibus. It happens in Parma, in the spring, and it is where the Italian food industry gathers — manufacturers large and small, importers, distributors, buyers, chefs, and a certain category of person who simply cannot stay away from a room that contains this much of what they love. We fell into the last category, though our credentials from the Mercato gave us VIP access and made it official. We had booked our flight to Ita

by: Joseph Harris There is a concept in the world of longevity research called a Blue Zone. The term came from a simple act — two scientists in 1999, mapping the villages in the mountainous Ogliastra province of Sardinia where men routinely lived past a hundred, drawing circles on the map in blue marker wherever the centenarians clustered. The blue circles gave the phenomenon its name. Dan Buettner later expanded the research globally and identified five places on earth where

by Joseph Harris My first deep understanding of the special regional characteristics of Italy came from pottery. Not food. Not wine. Not travel. Pottery — and the bricks that built the Duomo. This requires some explanation. When Kathleen and I first opened the Mercato, we were doing what every new shop does — chasing suppliers, building relationships, trying to find the people who cared about the same things we cared about. We had been introduced to a smallish importer called

by Joseph Harris This chapter begins, as so many chapters of my life do, with my stepfather Bill Greene. Bill is the subject of his own document and his own deepening list of stories — he was my mother's second husband, married into our family in 1962, and was the most interesting man I have ever known. He gets a full chapter of his own. For Cinco de Mayo what matters is this: Bill brought Mexican food into a North Carolina kitchen at a moment when no one else in our part of

by Joseph Harris We came to Siena from the south, which is the wrong direction if you want an easy introduction to the city. Siena doesn't have a simple entry point. The ancient center was built for foot traffic and horses, not automobiles, and the Sienese have made no particular accommodation for the modern error of arriving by car. There are narrow one-way streets that go nowhere useful, surveillance cameras that record your mistakes, and a general architectural consensus t

Our journey brings us to Tuscany—a region that feels instantly familiar, even if you’ve never been. Known for its rolling hills, cypress-lined roads, and timeless countryside, Tuscany is home to cities like Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, and Siena, where tradition still shapes daily life. It’s a place where art, history, and food are inseparable—where every meal feels grounded in something older, something lasting. A Culture Rooted in the Land Tuscany is often d

A love letter to Lombardy, and to Sharon, who let the bidding go just a little too far By Joseph Harris Every year, on a weekend in late summer, the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens does something quietly magical. It opens its gates to local wineries and restaurants, sets tables among the flowers and the fog, and invites the community to wander, taste, and give money to the hospital. The event is called Wine Song. It has been going on for thirty years, maybe more. It is the

This week, our Tour of Italy takes us to Lombardy, a region of contrasts, where grand cities meet alpine landscapes, and refined cuisine is shaped by both land and tradition. Home to Milan, Italy’s fashion and financial capital, Lombardy is often seen as modern and fast-paced. But beyond the city, the region opens into serene lakes like Lake Como and Lake Garda, rolling countryside, and mountain villages where culinary traditions remain deeply rooted and quietly preserved. A

This week, our Tour of Italy takes us to Liguria, a narrow ribbon of coastline known as the Italian Riviera, where mountains meet the sea and every meal feels touched by salt air and sunlight. Stretching along the northwest coast of Italy, Liguria is a place of quiet beauty, pastel villages, and a cuisine shaped by both land and water. Here, cooking is light yet deeply flavorful, built on herbs, olive oil, fresh seafood, and a reverence for simplicity. Where the Sea Meets the