Hi guys,

I hope this finds you all safe, healthy, and masked. 

If you have been following me on Instagram, you know that I have recently finished my new literary endeavor, a cook book and memoir called “Instagram to Table”. I find ironic that, a year and a half ago, I got into food after a breakdown for yet another agent rejecting me, a big agent I had been able to approach thanks to the recommendation of a kind friend. “I am done with writing,” I remember saying. I was in New York, exhausted and heartbroken.

And here I am, with my second book finished. I wish I had realized I was being rejected because I didn’t have a real project in my hands, a story to tell, but just the seeds that needed food to come together and become my story. 

I have just started shopping the book, and I am again looking for an agent, but I wanted to give you a taste of what’s coming. This isn’t a recipe, but a short essay about one of the happiest times in my life.

xoxo

***

A few weeks ago, Catherine and I had breakfast outside, on the patio. We used to do this every day, until June gloom arrived and we felt more comfortable inside, at the kitchen table. 

When we had our breakfast, that morning, June gloom had not shown up. 

“It’s not foggy!” Catherine said as soon as I opened the shutters, in her bedroom, when I woke her up. “There’s the sun! C’è il sole!” She was so happy that she decided not to read the usual morning books; she wanted to go down to the kitchen, spread some honey on her fette biscottate (the Mulino Bianco golden rusks we eat every day), and eat on the patio.

So we set the table, sat down, and began to eat. 

The breeze brushed my hair.

“It feels like the end of summer in Pilaz,”

I thought.

My heart got heavy, all of a sudden, heavy with a sense of longing. Pilaz, you may already know, is the small village in the Aosta Valley, in Italy, where I spent all my childhood summer and winter vacations.

While Catherine ate, I started to type this in my notes, on my phone. I try to not stay too much on the phone in front of her, since we are limiting screen time to a minimum (Skype with my parents, Ben’s sisters, and Mr. Rogers in the evening). 

“Mamma deve solo scrivere una cosa amore, ok? I told her. ‘Mama just needs to write something down, my love’’

The wind chimes that hang just behind the table sounded like the church bells from the nearby town of Antagnod, just a few minutes up the hill from Pilaz. I could almost see the yellow dome of the bell tower, the small, beautiful cemetery right below, and the mountains.

The color of the sky, that morning in Los Angeles, was intense; not quite blue, not quite grey — magical. It was as if, like at the end of summer up in the mountains, it held back the rain just a little longer.

I have been skipping the butter on my fette biscottate lately, so I dipped them in my latte, no sugar, just a splash of oat milk. In Pilaz, breakfast was simple as well, made of grissini soup (breadsticks dipped in warm caffe latte), and for a good reason. Just two houses up from ours, Marco Perono, the town baker, makes the best grissini I have ever had to this day. They are special, because they are made with the iced water that comes straight from the mountains, a water like no other. 

When I was little, I always wanted one of Marco’s breadsticks and a roof stalactite (something you could grab from any roof back in the days, when rain was still relatively pure water). My grandmother would wrap the ice in a paper towel, and I would take a bite of each. I remember being happy, and I remember the feeling of holding the ice in my hands, and the flavor of that odd combination.

I tell Catherine I am writing about Pilaz. She wants to go there and see the cows. 

We keep eating; I look at the view. I see Griffith Park, and the massive oak tree in my garden. The wind blows, the sun comes out a little more. In Pilaz, we had breakfast at the tiny kitchen table by the window; we saw the mountains, the main street to Champoluc, the bigger town just a few minutes away, and the Évançon river across the street. When I was little, there wasn’t much traffic. 

I would face my grandparents; behind me a cabinet where we kept oil, sugar, and salt, behind them a poster with all the species of mushrooms. The setting was perfect for us all to look outside. 

Our kitchen window stood by the balcony where Anna, the owner of the house and my grandmother’s best friend, would hang clothes to dry. I love Anna so much!

She would come up every morning to wish the bun levà, good morning in the Aosta Valley patuà. My grandmother wouldn’t start her day well without Anna’s good morning. 

The water of the Évançon river is a beautiful grey-blue. The color is so unique that the only fair comparison I can find is Paul Newman’s eyes in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and still that quite doesn’t translate it. 

When I was little, in fact for my first 18 years of life, we spent the month of August in Pilaz, because my grandparents rented a beautiful house there. They had started renting in 1982, the year I was born, and my grandfather kept the house until 2002, one year after my grandmother died. 

Every now and then, I read a few pages of my grandmother’s diaries. But I haven’t done it in a while, so I decided to take the opportunity given me by this piece for opening one up and see, out of curiosity, what she wrote of a normal day in August, in Pilaz.

It was cloudy and it rained on August 5th of 1989; it was a Saturday. 

I read that I had breakfast alone with my grandmother, and that after we had finished we went downstairs to wish Anna good morning. We went to the nearby town of Periasc to buy some groceries, and on the way back we walked home through the pine forest along which the Evançon river runs. After lunch, we walked to the trout lake and ate our afternoon snack there. The following day, my brother and I woke up very early and went into my grandparents’ bed for cuddles. That same evening we went on a walk with my mom, before retiring for the day. 

I could read her stories forever. Her writing isn’t erudite. And yet every word opens up a world. Every word refreshes my memory, almost as if I could clearly remember 1989. 

I don’t have many regrets. I took many wrong turns over the years, and I would avoid some of them if I could. But the very one regret I have is never having been able to tell my grandparents how much I loved them, how much I appreciated them, and that my most vivid and powerful memories are of the stories I created with them.

Some of my most vivid memories are about the end of summer in Pilaz, and of the long shadows approaching — as Anna calls that time of year.

Grazie Madri e nonno Arigo; thank you, Madri and grandpa Arigo.