When made at home, this sweet is the best welcome you can give. It’s a gesture of affection for the people you love, the people it’s a pleasure to spend time with, eating and unwinding within your own four walls. These desserts are almost always the work of tender, gnarled and expert hands, the product of simple ingredients that jostle for space in the kitchen cupboards – sugar, yeast, chocolate, honey, jam – the stuff that all of us, as children, were wont to plunder, stretching out our hands ...

One of the most important grape varieties of Italy, the word Sangiovese embodies some of the complexity – or versatility, perhaps – in a character that is as mysterious as its name. Such is the history surrounding this grape that it was cited at least as far back as Pier Soderini in the 1500s, but given the vast job we would have in combing the annals of Sangiovese references, we will limit ourselves to the most common theories regarding its name’s origins.

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Around here the horizon is a line broken only by poplar trees, farm buildings and a handful of other things. The plain unrolls for miles and miles, and in this crook of land between the Po and the Oglio a building or two pops up every so often, completely static. The little sat-nav screen says that we’re 19 meters above sea level, and that’s where the needle remains fixed.

This is one of the reasons why the walls of Sabbioneta, or what remains of them, are so ...

Cabernet Sauvignon is the most widely cultivated grape in the world. To give you some idea of its popularity, the famous journalist and wine critic Jancis Robinson has described it as the “chocolate” to “Chardonnay’s vanilla”. In the global imagination, this grape conjures up wines, often fine ones, of international repute.

The origins of Cabernet Sauvignon long remained mysterious. Certain theories held it to be a grape that hailed from Epirus and which had found its ...

Pici, pinci, appicciare...what are you talking about?

That would have been the response of any number of Florentines, had they been asked if they knew what pici were, if they had ever tasted pici. Until a few decades ago, this wonderful pasta was completely unknown outside of the Val d’Orcia. My dear Sienese friend Stefano Tesi, a diehard member of the Dragon contrada (Siena’s sixteen districts, or contrade, all have their own symbolic animal), tells me that they were a fairly rare ...