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• by:
• Willinger, Faith Heller

Faith Willinger has spent three decades exploring Italy, traveling from the Alps to Sicily to visit its artistic and architectural wonders and track down the best restaurants, regional cooks, winemakers, and food markets. Along the way, she’s made many friends, eaten lots of tasty meals, and collected a wealth of authentic Italian recipes. Now, in Adventures of an Italian Food Lover, she pays tribute to her friends and to the food and wine she’s enjoyed in their company. If you plan to visit Italy, you can use this book as a guide to finding some of Willinger’s favorite places, from tiny shops stocked with foods available nowhere else in the world, to outdoor markets overflowing with an incredible variety of fish, cheese, fruit, and vegetables, to great restaurants in big cities and small villages. If you can’t travel to Italy as soon as you’d like to, Willinger’s recipes from real Italian kitchens, her warm, engaging profiles of the cooks who perfected them, and her sister’s charming watercolors of Italian friends and scenery beautifully evoke the essence of this enchanting country.

The recipes all start with great ingredients—extra virgin olive oil, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, heirloom wheat pasta, salt-packed capers, and other Italian pantry favorites—and use the freshest meat, fish, and seasonal produce. Willinger’s friend and neighbor in Florence shares her recipe for the delicious home-style Turnips and Their Greens with Garlic and Chili Pepper; the chef-owner of a bustling Neapolitan trattoria combines the freshest ingredients from the sea and the field in his Pasta with Mussels and Zucchini Flowers; and a Milanese marketing consultant who inherited his family’s vineyard in Le Marche and started an enological revolution in the region provides the recipe for the rustic Polenta with Tomato Sauce and Sausage Ragù he often serves to guests in the elegant formal dining room of his art deco villa.