I learned about Garmugia while working as the private chef at Tenuta di Valgiano, a biodynamic winery in the hills North-East of Lucca. I would drive to the Tuesday morning farmer’s market in Ponte a Moriano and buy artichokes and asparagus from Stefano, a local grocer. Then to Federico’s farm nearby in Saltocchio for the peas and beans. At the base of Valgiano’s hill is an excellent butcher shop, Menesini, where I would almost exclusively procure the meats for the Villa during my time there. When private cheffing, I enjoy the shopping as much as the cooking, bouncing around the valley in the little Panda visiting farms and markets, trying out different roadside coffee shops each time, sampling different versions of the local salty breakfast pastry, valdostana (a thin puff pastry pie filled with a layer of tomato paste, cooked ham, béchamel or mozzarella), or if in a sweet mood, budino di riso (a shortcrust pastry encased rice pudding).

I first came to Tenuta di Valgiano in September 2018, arriving on my road bike laden down with heavy panniers, to work two weeks of the vendemmia, the grape harvest. Tenuta di Valgiano is the most prestigious biodynamic winery in Lucca. Between 2018-2019, after graduating from university, I spent a year wwoofing and cycling in Italy. I ended up at Valgiano because they were the first to respond to my email requesting to join their harvest. Upon returning to Dublin, something about Valgiano and the two winemakers who I had met there, Saverio and Lisandro, remained in my mind. It was here that I first glimpsed a way of living that I had always dreamed of but didn’t think existed. For years I intended to return, but work or university always got in the way.

In August 2023, while working as a cook and living in London, my housemates and I were evicted from our apartment with short notice. The grape harvest would start in a few weeks. Rather than jumping into a new living situation, I emailed Valgiano’s head winemaker, Saverio, asking if he still had space to take me, last minute, for the coming harvest. He responded immediately: “Yes! Come when you want!” He explained that he had left Valgiano and had his own label now, Malgiacca, using rented vineyards and a rented cantina (cellar). He offered to put me in touch with Valgiano, if I would rather, but I responded that I specifically wanted to work with him again. It was decided. I booked a flight.

Two weeks later, the last to leave the London apartment, I was taking out three bags of rubbish to the outdoor bins. As I dumped the third bag, a gust of wind slammed the front door shut and locked me out of the house. I called my friend Phoebe, who had a spare key down at her Mother’s house in Battersea. The last thing I wanted to do in that moment, in the middle of packing, was travel one hour by tube down South, but I had no choice. I arrived to Phoebe’s Mum’s house and we sat in the garden drinking fresh turmeric and ginger tea. I voiced my concerns and worries about this choice to go away for the grape harvest instead of hunting for a new apartment in London. I had a strange feeling which I couldn’t identify. Phoebe reminded me that it was just a holiday, I was overthinking. As evening approached, Phoebe, her Mum and her sister walked me back to the tube through Battersea Park with their dog. At a certain moment, the dog shat. Phoebe picked up the poo, walked over to a bin and let out a gasp of shock. I assumed she had gotten shit on her hand but then she exclaimed “Laura!” and walked towards me with excitement in her eyes. In her hand she held a small silver plaque with the word Lucca engraved into it - not the name Luca with one ‘c’, but the city, the place I was flying to the following day. We all got very excited. The trepidation dissolved and I felt calm with the decision to go.

When I arrived to Lucca train station, another farm worker, Jacopo from Rome, collected me and drove me out to the rented cellar in Gragnano. The car stopped outside the rental house and Saverio walked towards me smiling, arms partially crossed and one hand rubbing an elbow, something he does when he’s thinking. He was thinner than before, and he had a big grey beard now, the same warm eyes. We looked at each other for a moment, smiling, he recognized me and announced: “You returned!” I felt that feeling of returning to a place you call home after a long absence. I knew instantly that I was in the right place, with the right people, at the right time. I slept soundly that night.

I struggle to write about that time. The grape harvest is always magical, but with that one in particular, so much happened in such a short space of time. Everyday felt like a full and satisfying lifetime. I shared a room with a woman who was to become one of my best friends for life. We worked the Lucca fields and cellar during the week, handpicking in the mornings, destemming over chicken-wire and foot-stomping in the afternoons. Long, physical days punctuated by long, boozy lunches overlooking the vineyard. On weekends Saverio would pack the five of us wwoofers into the truck and we would go to the vertiginous slopes of Liguria to pick his partner’s grapes in a rented vineyard north of Sestri Levante. Days of picking, processing, eating Ligurian foccaccia, cecina, freshly caught fish, swimming in the sea, drinking local wines.

The two weeks I had originally agreed to passed too fast, so I stayed for the full five weeks of harvest. As the work came to a close I felt strongly that I didn’t want to leave this place. Saverio’s business partner, Lisandro, and his girlfriend Martina, were living in a small cottage at Tenuta di Valgiano. Neither Lisandro nor Martina worked there anymore but they were in the process of buying a home nearby. After the harvest, they were travelling to Brazil for a month and needed a house-and-cat sitter. I volunteered and found myself beginning my new life in Lucca back at Tenuta di Valgiano. I flew to London to collect my belongings and returned with the aim of attending language school for a month and then landing a job somehow, somewhere.

One day, after the language school had ended, I descended from a cycle in the hills at dusk. The white Jeep of the owner of the estate pulled up alongside me, I stopped the bike as the window rolled down and Laura and I had a brief conversation:

“Are you still living on my property?”

“Yes.”

“Have you finished that language course?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m looking for work. If you know of anyone who needs someone in the kitchen, the garden, the vineyard, I’m pretty flexible.”

“But what do you do usually?”

“I’m a cook,” I said. She looked away for a moment and then asked, “what are you doing tomorrow?”

“Nothing,” I replied with a shrug and a smile.

“I have five people coming to lunch tomorrow, come to the villa and cook for us.”

“Ok, sure.” I kept my face calm and my voice steady. My heart was thumping. The following day, I cooked. They were pleased. I cooked the day after that as well, and the day after that. I began to work as the private chef for the family and paying guests in the sixteenth-century villa kitchen. I moved into a crumbling outbuilding on the estate which housed the shared kitchen for farm staff, had no heating and neighboured with two boys who I had met during the harvest who would later become close friends.

For paying guests, the food I prepared was mostly Tuscan, while the family enjoyed a sprinkling of Irish-British soups, salads, pies and cakes. Through Laura, and through my friends, I became acquainted with local biodynamic and organic producers of vegetables, beans, polenta, and heritage grains. Work was enjoyable and dynamic. I learned about Lucchese cuisine and wine-pairing. I cooked for winemakers, food writers, actors, Michelin-starred chefs. And at home, with the boys, I learned how to really cook from Stefano, one of the most talented cooks I have ever met (and the bar in Italy is high amongst the civilian population). Stefano and I bonded over food: cooking for friends, fermenting, preserving, experimenting. I would watch, listen, chop, stir, taste, clean. I was his little sous. Food was the foundation of our friendship, and for a year and a half our love language.

While working with Stefano last Spring (we briefly had a small business together), we developed a Garmugia-inspired filled pasta for a private event. The filling was a combination of finely chopped artichoke, asparagus and pea with ricotta whipped with preserved lemon. The bright green fava beans were scattered on top of the little parcels which we served with a veal fondo and parmiggiano. It was tasty, but the ricotta dominated a little too much, I need to tweak and trial it again.

To return to the traditional Garmugia recipe. The meat broth, prepared before, could be anything: poultry, rabbit, beef, pork, whatever you have - it doesn’t really matter, my preference is chicken because it’s slightly lighter in flavour and combines well with the minced veal during cooking. Each of the vegetables are best prepared separately. The peas and fava beans have to be shelled, briefly blanched in heavily salted water to retain their vibrant green colour, then double-shelled. A somewhat painstaking job, but sitting with no time limit, ideally outside in sunshine with some nice music playing and a companion, makes this task enjoyable. The artichokes, once cleaned, I pan fry with olive oil, herbs and some of the lemon water that I sit them in as I work to prevent them from oxidising. Brown your minced veal, pouring off excess fat and set aside. Fry the pancetta, add back in the mince, top up with heated broth. I add the cleaned asparagus stalks first, cut into small bite-sized pieces, then the artichokes and at the last moment, once the asparagus has softened but retains a bite, add the peas and beans and serve.

Tuscan soup is a very loose term in my experience. It could refer to the many stale bread soups, minestrone (tomato based, sometimes including small dried pasta shapes), ribollita from Florence, farinata in Lucca (incorporating polenta) - the list is endless.

Last February, a friend and I attended a cheesemaking course on the road towards the Apennine mountain range, North of Lucca. The workshop was based at a beautiful agriturismo on wooded, terraced land dotted with the traditional stone houses with roofs of grey slate. There was a cosy restaurant on site with a big open fire, and the primo on the lunch menu that day was Zuppa Toscana con erbe selvatiche, ‘Tuscan’ wild herb soup. The soup was thick with greenery, unidentifiable wilted leaves with traces of citrus and spice. It was delicious. To replicate this exactly, with that selection of foraged herbs, would be near impossible. An inspiring once in a lifetime soup.

Usually, Tuscan soup refers to an unblended or ‘chunky soup’, as my Mum would say, comprised of vegetables, beans or stale bread (or both), and broth. The base is always soffritto (onion, celery, carrot), there has to be cavolo nero (black kale), local beans (usually cannellini, but in Lucca, possibly the Bean Capital of Italy, there are so many varieties with different depths of flavour the possibilities are multiple), and then a vegetable or meat broth. Adding potato is very common, but you could freestyle with any starchy root vegetable (that starch is going to help thicken the liquid). A grain is usually welcome, such as spelt or barley (but these add gluten). Crushed, peeled or chopped tomato could be added with a little help from tomato concentrate. Topping the soup with (herby) croutons and freshly microplaned parmesan are essential finishing touches. And a generous glug of high quality extra virgin olive oil.

Today, instead of cannellini beans I’m using a variety of chickpea from Lucca, from Azienda Agricola Guido Favilla to be exact. Guido is a biodynamic farmer from Lucca with a beautiful, varied selection of beans, lentils, polenta and grains. Since returning to Dublin a few weeks ago, I have exhausted my bean supply. The only cannellini beans I have found here are the product of conventional farming and hail from Egypt. I did try these on a friend three weeks ago and I wasn’t happy with the colour (grey?!), texture (mealy) and flavour (non-existent).

Recently, a chef friend and I discussed Tuscan soup over lunch. We were sitting in my favourite restaurant in Lucca, Buatino, sharing a plate of pasta and a bowl of farinata - the aforementioned thick Lucchese take on Tuscan soup which uses polenta. Buatino serves the best farinata I have tried. A close second is the farinata we used to make at the restaurant last summer, which was put in the fridge overnight, cut into small rectangles the following day and deep-fried. My friend and I have made Tuscan soup together many, many times, both at home and for private cooking events. We noted how we had never made the same soup twice, something was always tweaked, but every time it was exceptionally good. We are good at soup. We decided that what makes our soup so good is: high quality ingredients (obviously), cooking all the components separately before joining them together, and a very flavourful broth base.

Make the broth first. Usually, I am a less-is-more person when it comes to ingredients, but I take the opposite approach with broth - more! MORE! More bay leaves! More alliums! More celery! More peppercorns! More ginger! - and yes, I almost always have ginger floating around in a broth. While broth is great for leftover peel, skin and discarded bits, they have to be still somewhat fresh when they get thrown into the water. If you cook slightly moldy leek, you will taste slightly moldy leek out the other side. I like to use something starchy for a bit of thickening, or the heel of finished hard, aged cheese, like parmesan or pecorino. And I’m a big fan of chucking in as many non-bitter fresh herbs as possible: rosemary, bay, thyme, oregano, marjoram. Depending on what you’re using a broth for, sometimes a bit of spice from cloves or fennel seed is a lovely addition. Or chilies for heat.

For a soup with a vegetable broth base, the cooking water from the beans is essential for flavour and texture. Always keep bean cooking water!

I simmer (boiling reduces flavour and nutrition content) a vegetable broth for at least an hour. Chicken broth for a minimum of 1.5 hours, and at least 2 hours for red meat or bone. For meat broths, added flavour comes from roasting the carcass, bones, head, feet etc., beforehand. Never salt a broth. Once you salt a broth you cannot control the salt content of whatever your finished dish will be.

So, a Tuscan soup. The night before, soak the beans of choice. The day of the soup, cook the broth in one pot, and the beans in another (add some bay, maybe some peppercorns, or instead of water, a tannic breakfast tea, chef’s choice). When the broth has been simmering for an hour, and the beans are still too al-dente, begin to dice the vegetables for the soffritto (onion, celery, garlic), the root vegetable, and de-stem the kale (or finely slice the cabbage). For unblended soup, I prefer vegetables diced small and neat. I like the mouthfeel and find it aesthetically pleasing. Throw all the discards into the simmering broth or save for the next one. If you prepare the vegetables too far in advance they will dry out a little, and the potatoes will oxidise.

I cook the soffritto in a tall pot, add a bit of salt and then cover the vegetables with baking paper so that they sweat. If you simply cover with a lid there is too much space between the vegetables and the lid for them to properly sweat out their water content. Once the colour has become more saturated and the edges softer in appearance, I add the root vegetable, tomato concentrate and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, more salt and pepper. Potato sticks easily, so a ladle of broth could be needed. Stir it well, and then cover with the baking paper to let it sweat for a little longer. After a few minutes, if using peeled tomatoes from a tin, now is the moment. Cover the mixture with the broth that has been gently simmering away in a separate pot. Here, throw in any woody herbs at hand. Allow to simmer uncovered until the vegetables have softened but still have a bite to them. No one wants to eat melted or mushy vegetables in a soup. Add the kale/cabbage.

When the kale is wilting a little, but still vibrant green, add the beans and as much bean water as the soup can take without drowning out the vegetables. Simmer until the kale is limp but still green. Taste for salt, taste for vegetable texture. If there is too much liquid, reduce the heat and simmer off as much as you can without killing the vegetables and dissolving the beans (oh shiiiiiit). Vegetables kept very al-dente will be very forgiving here.

Sometimes, I ladle a quarter or third of the soup into the food processor and blend it before adding it back to the main soup. This gives the soup a lovely, thick, creamy texture. It’s particularly great on colder days.

Plate, crouton, Parmesan, oil. Finito.

I have reached my Dante year. Thirty-five. In the Commedia (aka The Divine Comedy), Dante places himself at the gates of hell during his thirty-fifth year, the halfway point of life, according to the biblical lifespan of seventy years. Considering the biblical lifespan, I have roughly 12,784 days remaining, if I make it to seventy. If you knew when you were going to die, what would that change? Would it make a difference to how you live, the decisions you make, the people you choose to spend time with?

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

che la diritta via era smarrita.

Using the Robert and Jean Hollander translation, which was a favourite of my professor: Midway in the journey of our life / I came to myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost.

Although a theological work, Dante’s ‘dark wood’ is more of a mid-life crisis than a crisis of faith. He wrote the Commedia after being exiled from his beloved Florence for picking the wrong political side. The poem is his understanding of faith, morality and salvation, but it’s also a bit like a high-brow bitchy gossip column. I have no faith, am suspicious of moral ideas, and I do not believe in the religious concept of salvation. But I do love gossip. And there is tons of it. Transforming himself into a pilgrim character, we follow thirty-five year old Dante on a three-day odyssey to salvation over the Easter weekend of 1300 CE.

The Commedia is a poem, divided into three cantiche (books), with one introduction and thirty-three cantos (episodes) in each book, to make a total of one-hundred cantos. It’s written in terza rima, which are three-line stanzas (tercets). Organised religion loves numbers. Three is a magic number. A vertical reading of the Commedia carries you chronologically through Dante’s journey through Hell (punishment), up to Purgatory (purification), and finally ascending into Heaven (enlightenment). Dante has three Guides along the way, all historical figures with an allegorical function: Virgil (reason), Beatrice (divine grace and revelation), and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (contemplation and devotion).

The poem almost exclusively features historical and living figures from Dante’s Italy (gossip!), whom he either condemns or saves based on his own moral code - famously placing the Pope at the time, Boniface VIII, in the Eighth Circle of Hell for simony (he is eternally dunked upside down into holes while his feet are scorched by flames!). Dante wrote the Commedia in the vernacular (Old Tuscan for him), a radical move away from the traditional Latin, aimed at a wider readership (it worked, and this is why Tuscan became the official Italian language in the newly unified State in the nineteenth century).

What fascinated me about the Commedia was the harsh medieval Christian morality, the imaginative torture methods, and the ‘horizontal’ reading. Each numbered canto across the three cantiche is thematically related, but almost every canto, non-related by number, also has a second thematic match across the cantiche. Intricately woven. Many, many layers. The scope of the work is insane. It lends itself well to seven-hundred years of commentary and analysis.

I am reflecting on my Guides: the people I have encountered throughout life thus far who have shown me a different way to be in or see the world. My Guides have always been unplanned encounters, appearing just at the right moment in time. None of them know that I consider them Guides. Their presence can be fleeting or lifelong. And the new portal they open in my mind is the product of conversation and observation. I have not yet assigned any of them an allegorical function. However, every one of my Guides has an insatiable passion for life and curiosity about the world around them. Almost all of them live somewhat unconventional lives compared to the masses, although there is a finance bro in the collection, one of the most laidback people I have ever known (I often ask myself: what would B. do in this situation? And I feel relaxed by whatever realistic imagined response I come up with).

12,784 days. I remember every Guide, and the time period that they appeared. But there is so much I don’t know about my own life. For how much of my time was I asleep? Imagine being able to watch a montage of every dream you’ve ever had. How much time have I spent in the company of friends? At work? By the sea? Reading? Watching films? Genuinely laughing? Feeling in love? Crying? Feeling anxious? Feeling as if I was in the right place, at the right time, with the right people?

When Dante meets Virgil, they bond instantly and understand each other immediately. Despite belonging to two different worlds centuries apart, they seem to know each other. As I thought about Guides, I also thought about the people I have met who I have felt I have known my whole life in an instant. The immediate bond is mutual. A strange and exciting feeling.

The head winemaker at the biodynamic winery I have worked two harvests at is very spiritual in a kind of pick’n’mix pagan-Buddhist way. He believes in the recycling of souls. He believes that he and his current partner met in a past life and have reconnected in this one. He believes that, for better or worse, their souls are intrinsically bound together. But, outside of romantic love, the idea of souls encountering each other over millennia, finding each other again and again, in new worlds and different times, without memories of previous encounters but with a memory of the soul contained within the eyes and the movements and the mind, is a beautiful concept.

Many of my close friends made later in life could fall into the recycled soul category. I have gotten good at recognising them. How many more will I have the opportunity to meet? Where are they now and where will they be when we meet? What adventures will we have together? It’s a nice thought.

My head chef in London, Jack, posed this question to my colleagues and I one afternoon. Afternoons were the most enjoyable time of the day because the breakfast and lunch rushes had finished and the atmosphere was more relaxed in our little basement prep-kitchen. Jack, a softly-spoken gentle ginger giant, described a decadent grilled or fried sandwich he would make, to be eaten standing up at the kitchen counter. Andrew said more or less the same. Ivan, from Mexico City, gave us his version of tortilla drowned in sauce and cheese. We all agreed that solo-meals are best enjoyed standing up at the kitchen counter. Nat, one of the poshest people I have ever met, said she would cook a simple steak. Jack reiterated the brief: you cannot go to the shop, you have to use what you have. Nat claimed that she would never be too tired or too lazy to walk to her local organic butcher. We excluded Nat from the game.

I disagreed with the designation of a sandwich as a ‘meal’ and detailed my go-to solo dish. I would defrost meat stock (the others said it was improbable to always have a supply of meat stock in the freezer, but I usually do), take a loaf tin from the press, place stale bread in the bottom of the tin and cover with the stock, crack two eggs on top, salt and pepper, and bake it in the oven for 5-10mins, or when the eggs were cooked. If I had hard cheese, I would grate cheese on top. When I finished my explanation, Jack stated that that was the saddest meal he had ever heard of and described it as ‘almost medicinal’ and ‘peasant food from medieval times’.

The kitchen in London was a great time, I have never laughed so much nor so hard at work. The above conversation led to some food experiments. One chicken-roasting day, we lined an oven tray with sliced and buttered sourdough bread and then placed the chickens on top so that the bread would cook in the juices. When the chickens were lifted off, the bread was fried in a pan. The result may be one of the heaviest thing I’ve ever ingested, but it was delicious. I’ve never eaten so much in a workplace. The head pastry chef named me ‘Mouse Girl’.

If I presented an Italian with my bread-and-egg-broth meal, they would be neither surprised nor impressed. Stale bread is a very popular ingredient all over the peninsula. The last time I ate at my favourite trattoria in Firenze, Camillo, I ordered a dish from the primi section called Stracciatella, (not the ice-cream), which I had never heard of. Apparently it’s Roman. What arrived to the table was essentially scrambled eggs and stale bread swimming in a meat broth with parmiggiano grated on top. It was a good winter plate, but my version is better.

During my time in Italy there were rarely solo dinners. I learned so much about regional food from cooking with friends at home. But solo dinners are often a chance to experiment with flavours and ingredients in a way that you never would if you knew you were going to serve the end result to somebody other than yourself. Risk-free risky behaviour. Living with a group of men in their mid-twenties with efficient metabolisms introduced me to another home-cooking concept that I called ‘dirty meals’. Meals with too much sauce, too much grease, too much cheese, too much homemade chipotle or anchovy mayonnaise. Food that is decadent and delicious but you go to bed that night feeling a tinge of regret for your belly and your skin. These meals tended to be highly creative and excellent for clearing the fridge, for example, chestnut pancakes filled with lemon-whipped ricotta, homemade fennel kimchi, anchovies, nasturtium leaves and, of course, a mountain of grated parmiggiano.

Chestnut pancakes, necci, are famous in Lucca and the neighbouring mountain region of Garfagnana. The Garfagnana is covered in chestnut trees and each November the chestnut flour is ready. Processing the chestnuts is done by hand, a painstaking and time-consuming process. One of the farmworkers on the vineyard where I used to live produced chestnut flour with his family, so we had a direct supplier in Winter 2023. Necci are cooked with a heavy cast-iron tool called testi on an open fire. The testi consist of two circular paddles with long handles, the interior of the paddles are rubbed with olive oil, usually using half a potato skewered on a fork when the paddles are hot, and the batter is ladled into the centre of one paddle before closing the paddle heads onto one another. Usually necci are filled with thin slices of lardo from Camaiore (the one aged in Cararra marble basins) with a sprinkle of finely chopped rosemary, or local ricotta and honey, or lardo and honey, or nutella. Once filled, the necci were folded and cut into four or five portions and passed around the room. They are addictive. By mid-December, almost every night was Necci Night, and the more we ate, the more diverse the fillings became: raw Tuscan sausage, chickpea stew, lentils with guanciale, peanut butter and jam. Traditional necci cannot be described as a dirty meal, but anything can become a dirty meal when you put your mind to it.

Necci - Tuscan Chestnut Pancake (naturally gluten-free)

500g chestnut flour (farina di castagna), sieved

450ml of water

Pinch of salt

Drop of EVOO (extra virgin olive oil)

Most people will not have testi, or an appropriate open fire to cook on, but these can be cooked on a frying pan like traditional French crepes. If the batter appears to be too thick, add a little more water, but it should have structure to it. The pan should be lightly oiled and very hot. Your first pancake will likely be a dud. Accept and continue.

The clock was commissioned, like the churches of Alberti, by the ruling Gonzaga family and completed in 1473. Created by Bartolomeo Manfredi, astronomer and engineer at the court, the clock face displays the 24-hour clock, moon phases, zodiac signs and planetary movements. Within the tower a series of interconnected wrought iron cogs and gears control the movement of the metal, wooden and copper clock face. It was the first public clock in the city.

The installation of public clocks in cities is the beginning of modern timekeeping as we know it today. When I began to work as a cook, I accepted that the traditional concept of the working week dissolves. Days of the week lose their meaning. Work can happen on any day. Monday is not a bad day. There is no Sunday fear. Every day feels the same. There is no beginning or end to the week. But there are seasons: seasons for produce, seasons for work.

According to the info-boards, the Mantovan clock told citizens the time of day, but also the time to sow seeds, to travel, or to have blood-letting. I enjoyed the blood-letting reference. I wanted more information on this; there was none. When public clocks arrived to Italian cities, most people were still living with the land and the seasons. When I moved to the countryside outside of Lucca, five hundred years later, not much had changed. Everyone I knew there worked in agriculture or hospitality. Everyone either grew their own food or purchased food from local producers. I almost never ate something that I didn’t know the direct origin of. Grain, chickpeas, beans, lentils, olive oil, vegetables, meat, wine. It was a different way of life for me, something I had always wanted but never thought possible. I loved this new life, but I was unsure of myself often. I didn’t know how to cook chestnut pancakes on a fire. Or how to cook anything on an open fire in a living room. I didn’t know how to identify wild herbs or forage for mushrooms. I felt stupid for a long time. But I got good at building fires.

Life in Lucca was relentlessly social. It was rare to ever be alone. Tasks were shared, time was shared. During the long days of summer, when not working, everyone was always at the sea, the river, the mountains or endless aperitivo. In winter, when almost no one worked, the day revolved around the chopping and collection of wood, the building and keeping of the fire and the purchase, preparation and consumption of food, nights playing cards, dice or watching films on the projector. It felt as if I had stepped back in time while remaining in the present, still connected to the original reality by my smartphone. While I was very content in the present, I became increasingly worried about the future.

I often thought of a passage from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls:

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow… [T]here is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion.”

Is Hemingway talking simply about his protagonist’s precarious position at that moment in the story, or is he talking of the value of life during war, or is he speaking about life generally? I’ve never known, but at eighteen I decided he was giving life advice. I think that is partially why I have always found desk jobs low-key traumatising. Imagine if you died on a Friday afternoon after a full week spent in an office working for something and someone you didn’t care about. No. But then this past summer I found myself working full-time in a professional kitchen, on-call cheffing for a catering company, and occasionally cheffing for private clients on the side. All of this to make ends meet. Suddenly, la dolce vita was not so dolce. There is no minimum wage in Italy. Very few jobs are well paid. Kitchen work is not one of them. I had a little existential crisis. Lucca had become home, but it didn’t feel sustainable.

In the walled city of Lucca, twenty years after the Mantovani received their astronomical clock, the commune purchased an existing tower from the Quartigiani family and mounted a simple clock face in 1490. In medieval Italy towers were symbols of power and wealth. Lucca, at one point in the 14th Century had upwards of 130 towers squashed into the small city centre. Hard to imagine that cityscape. Over time, as power changed hands, towers were torn down or repurposed. Today, two main towers remain: the Torre Guinigi, famous for the seven oak trees living on the highest level, and the clock tower, the beautifully named Torre delle Ore. Standing 50 meters tall on the main street of Lucca, Via Fillungo, there are 207 narrow wooden steps to reach the panoramic view at the top. I visited it for the first time on my final day in Lucca for a while. I stood under the beautiful copper bell as it tolled and vibrated through my body like an accidental free outdoor sound bath.

As the bell tolled, I thought of the campanile beside my vegetable garden in Diecimo, a tall rectangular Romanesque tower standing in the middle of the valley at the foothills of the Apuan Alps. I don’t know how much time I spent staring at that tower from our terrace over the course of the year and a half, rain, hail, in the darkness, in the hot summer sun. When at home I never had to check my phone to know the time, day or night, the bell would tell me on the hour and on the half hour. I would always pause when I heard it and count the tolls: in bed, cooking, reading, on the toilet, watching the fire. I loved that tower. And that bell. One recent grey winter morning I walked out to the field and said goodbye to it, as I always knew I would. And as I turned to leave, the bell tolled for me, ten times.

Alberti, a polymath of the Early Renaissance, packed a lot into his sixty-eight years. He studied law in Bologna, became a priest in the Vatican, and then entered the service of various courts across Northern Italy as a writer, philosopher, mathematician, and architect with seemingly uninhibited access to patron funding. Over a decade, Alberti wrote De Re Aedificatoria, the first ever printed book on architecture (1485). Alberti’s text is modelled on the Ten Books on Architecture written by Vitruvius for the Emperor Augustus between 20-30 BCE. Vitruvius’s manuscript was re-discovered during Alberti’s lifetime in a Swiss monastery - originally founded by an Irish monk no less (St. Gall). These texts, these architectural treatises, set out to codify the purpose, structural qualities and decorative motifs of architecture. Concepts long lost today.

Alberti’s designs are monumental. They are made from studies, as a study, to be studied. They are an amalgamation of his observations of the ruins of the Roman forum (partially excavated in the 14th Century - we have Mussolini to thank for the extent of the present-day forum, grazie Benito). In Mantova, Alberti superimposed the form of a classic tripartite triumphal arch across the facade of Sant’Andrea and replicated this motif repeatedly throughout the interior. The cavernous interior of the basilica is roofed by a singular barrel vaulted nave, with three towering barrel vaulted chapels lining both lateral walls. A nod to the forum’s Basilica of Maxentius. Alberti loved the barrel vault. He was, in fact, the first person to employ the barrel vault since the Fall of Rome. Basilica Sant’Andrea can be read as Alberti’s final ode to ancient Roman architecture.

I walked into the small piazza where the basilica lives and stared at a facade that I knew from photographs. Over the years I had pictured myself walking into this structure many times and I was finally here, in the physical, in the present. I looked at the barrel vault in the portico. I looked at the floor. I looked at the capitals of the pilasters, the grotesques flanking the door lintel. I looked up at the familiar face towering above me fast becoming a stranger to me in real time. Time present blending time past with time future. Imagined time. An imagined vision of the future created in the past, correcting itself in the present. And time future becoming time present becoming time past. At one time, I had imagined us visiting this work while we were still together. Me giving an unsolicited guided tour of the architectonic features, him indulging me momentarily before escaping, him returning to tell me how garish he found church decor, how these enormous silent spaces made him want to run up the nave screaming. Me rolling my eyes with a small smile, but then adding in a low voice with upmost sincerity and seriousness: “We simply do not have the same visual literacy today as our ancestors did. Peccato.” Me silently chastising myself for my sincerely held beliefs. None of this happened.

In another time, many years ago, I had also pictured being there with my ex-boyfriend during a year travelling around Italy. There’s a pattern here. Mantova is somewhat awkward to get to, we never made it. I stood under the portico and told my companion to go ahead and I would follow. I wanted to be alone. I needed the ghosts to fade. After all these years I could not cross this threshold with stains in my mind. I thought of my professor of architectural history, my first and only mentor and one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. It was she who introduced me to Alberti and Sant’Andrea. I imagined her standing there with me, a woman of tiny stature, a walking brain, always in platformed shoes, hair in a french roll with a chic little fringe, shrouded in a black woollen cape, her eyes and voice exploding with enthusiasm and passion. I would have liked for her to be there with me, walking slowly side by side down the nave, arm in arm, her telling me the secrets of the building in an attempted whisper. I walked through the door alone.

I knew exactly what I was going to see. I was fairly certain what I would feel. The scale is enormous, humbling and silencing. The eyes cannot take in the entire elevation at once. It is sublime, in the Hegelian sense, a vision or experience that evokes a sensation of incomprehension, fear and awe. These monuments contain so much: power, wealth, oppression, suppression, concepts of beauty, devotion, ideas of grandeur, spaces for human ritual, meditation, control, solace, suffering. I thought of the men who built it: what did they eat, what did they sing or chat shite about while laying bricks or slathering stucco? I thought of the millions of people who have walked through that space over five-hundred years, the clothes they all wore, the tears that have been shed in fear, celebration, shame or mourning. How would this space feel after dusk in the candlelit time before electricity? I would like to walk through that space by candlelight.

I exited the basilica thinking of a time in Bordeaux cathedral when I had walked through the building in the dark solely illuminated by candles. It was magical. It is how most of humanity has experienced the interior of churches over time before the late 19th Century. And Bordeaux cathedral, adhering to Gothic principles, is extraordinarily tall. Looking towards the ceiling in the darkness was like looking down to the sea floor in open water. Blackness.

I have seen Alberti’s other notable works in Firenze many times: the facade of Palazzo Ruccellai and the upper facade of Santa Maria Novella. Many years ago, while en route to a farm near Urbino, my train was delayed for twenty minutes in the coastal city of Rimini. There was a storm. According to Google maps, Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano was maybe a five-minute run from the platform, in a more or less straight line. The Tempio is Alberti’s first ecclesiastical work, and the first time the triumphal arch motif appears in a church facade. I ran through the wet and windy dark. And after a slight bend in the street, there it was, the unfinished temple front illuminated in artificial light, shining stone in the rain. It was beautiful. Alberti was as good in practice as he was on paper. I smiled at the temple, my face and clothes soaked from the downpour, and turned back to the soon-departing train.

During the first week of my Erasmus year in Rome, in September 2015, I was shown Bar San Calisto by a young Roman tour guide (who played Gaelic Football in Rome, oddly enough). Popular with students, the elderly, locals and tourists, the bar was a Roman institution south of the Tevere in the heart of Trastevere. Since opening in the late 1960s, almost nothing had changed. Famous for €2 500ml bottles of Peroni, they served coffee, cheap wine, spritzes in plastic cups, a niche Pugliese lager called Raffo and some decent gelato. It was a bar you could go to with friends, family, grandparents, or alone and be guaranteed to speak with a neighbouring stranger. Bar San Calisto was one of a kind in Rome, I don’t know of anywhere else like it within the historic centre.

The bar consisted of three spaces: the bar, the salon and the terrazzo. The terrazzo was comprised of small circular wooden peroni-branded tables, faded black plastic chairs and always an elderly man, alone, with a beer or a coffee, reading the newspaper just outside the entrance door, and always at least one crowded table of elderly men playing cards and reading the newspaper as a group. The salon had some chairs littered about occupied only by elderly locals shouting across the room to each other resembling a tiny sad dancehall of times past or the recreational room at an assisted living facility. The small bar was run with great efficiency. To one side was the bar itself, a stainless steel-topped bancone, with one or two speedy bartenders, and across the room from them was an open rectangular booth containing the aged proprietor and his till. He processed orders without eye-contact when one approached with foreign-inflected Italian, but he smiled when you surprised him with a cash payment rather than card.

After seven o’clock in the evening, San Calisto was chaos until two o’clock in the morning. Crowds of people jostled for chairs, groups stood alongside occupied tables hoping to swoop in when the time was right, and spilling outside of the railings upwards of thirty people would be standing chatting, smoking, drinking, in that order.

And today I read that it is being refurbished. The building team are encouraging locals to drop by to take souvenirs from the rubble of the now gutted space. A common practice in Rome since antiquity.

I don’t know how many times I have sat on the terrace of that bar, but I can recall every person I’ve brought there over the last decade. During Covid, myself and two friends worked remotely from Rome for a week and temporarily became locals at the spot. The last time I was there was Sunday 30th March 2025, with the two previous offenders and a group of close friends from Dungarvan. We visited twice during that weekend, daytime and nighttime, and on both occasions we nabbed a coveted table on the terrace. I didn’t know it would be the last time, but it was a very good time with the very best of company, and I’m feeling grateful for that today.

When I returned to Lucca four evenings ago, the first thing I did was to walk to the organic supermarket, Natura Sì, and purchase as many lemons, sticks of ginger and turmeric as I could manage with my luggage. I haven’t made it to the shops again, so have been living off a large locally-grown sweet potato that I stored away in November, and the remaining stash of wholegrain couscous and black rice that I had in my food press. I have been making one meal a day based around the super sexy brief: anti inflammatory, antibacterial. Everything is based on a soffritto of ginger, turmeric, and garlic. I am using the preserved lemons and oranges I made last spring with abandon. In the garden, the thyme, rosemary, sage and tarragon are still alive. And that never-ending purple sweet potato has been bringing its antioxidant game to my immune system.

I was reflecting on the last time I was this knocked out by a flu strain. I had Covid in mid-July 2024 and was bed-bound for a similar period of time. That time, however, I was being cared for by three men in their mid-twenties whom I worked with and lived beside - good friends. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that was my second-last week living on the vineyard where I worked as a private chef, my first job in Italy. Throughout the sickness, I was brought various meat and vegetable broths to my bedside, fresh tomato soup with lashings of a friend’s olive oil and one of them read me Italian children’s stories while waiting for a massive batch of tomato passata to cook in the communal kitchen below. This time I am alone, save for the occasional noise of the new house occupants, and the remaining cat, a nine month old kitten.

In the quietness and stillness of the solitude, I have been intermittently napping, scrolling instagram for recipe ideas for the coming months, messaging friends, watching some films and reading my book: Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère. But most of the time I am staring into space lost in thought. The prolonged yet disrupted sleep creates a pleasant numb feeling which makes the inertia bearable. I question how many days I have been eating that purple sweet potato. Surprisingly, I am not in any way depressed, and I’ve enjoyed this haze of sick days spent in bed at the beginning of the new year. I feel like a hibernating snake who’s losing its 2025 skin to be ready for 2026. (Google tells me snakes don’t hibernate, they brumate, which is hibernation-lite because they occasionally stir for water, which is in fact more accurate in my current case).

Thoughts from the haze: I have been thinking about passion for life, devotion to a craft, the concept of the ‘renaissance man’, the comeback of Jell-O in summer 2025 which I predicted a year before but never told anyone (Jesus fucking Christ) and how the Vitruvian Triad of firmitas, utilitas, venustas (strength/durability, function, beauty - the theoretical fundamentals of ancient Roman architecture) could be transposed to an ethos for the preparation of food. More on these another time.

I have started this substack as a writing exercise, a space to place my thoughts, share stories and actually write recipes outside of my journal. There is no theme, nor purpose, but food, life in Italy and architecture will likely feature heavily should I continue.

Preserved Lemons 🍋

For every entire lemon preserved, you’ll need the juice of one lemon for the jar where you will preserve them. I keep the skin on because I am fortunate enough to have friends with organically grown lemon trees. Scrub the skin well if you don’t have a tree or a friend with a tree. Partially quarter each lemon and roll it in a bowl of salt and sugar (2:1, roughly), stuffing the mixture inside the cuts. Place the salt-sugar-covered lemons in a sterilised jar and top up with your lemon juice. Wait about a month, will last probably more than two years 🤘

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