La Dolce Vita

For cooks and tourists alike, Italy is a culinary Eden. A siren calls, and that siren is a rotund nonna who offers traditional cooking secrets while chastising you for not eating enough. I was not immune to her song. In a damp February in Brooklyn, I began dreaming of her. I had secured my first job as a pastry cook after teaching myself to pipe and caramelize from jaunty vloggers on YouTube. But after months of long production days in a windowless basement, I decided to go out on my own, spending the winter hosting pop-up events at restaurants, making hundreds of pastries alone in my galley kitchen. I felt like an overgrown child playacting as a baker, constantly spilling flour and scorching oil, bungling techniques I’d watched chefs online execute with ease. I was rootless and isolated. I wanted to be part of something larger: a tradition. I wanted to go where legions of chefs and traveling gourmands had gone before me, to learn the ways of authentic Tuscan cooking.

Italy would be where I would whisk, mix, and knead my way into an idealized self. If I could get there, I would shed my anxious energy and compulsive need for affirmation, my nasty addiction to the cool-mint vape. I would slow down; I would journal. I would become tan and strong from simple pastas. I would eat intuitively — no more take-out burritos in the middle of the night, no more nubby cheeses scrounged from the bowels of the fridge. If I could find a way to go to Italy, I would become a real baker.

I found an internship through Jeff, a private chef who, in lieu of trailing his clients to their estates in the Hamptons, worked his summer months in Tuscany. Jeff described a family-run cooking school and agriturismo — a rural hotel with an emphasis on sustainability — on the grounds of a charming villa. He mentioned lemon-colored walls and a small village just a thirty-minute walk away. I’d be in charge of breakfast pastries and miscellaneous kitchen tasks. They couldn’t pay me, he said, but I’d be roomed, boarded, and fed. And I would become rich in the secrets of rural Tuscan cooking. Ordinarily, they only took culinary-school graduates, but because of the pandemic, they would make an exception. I said yes before he even made the offer. I imagined this would be exactly the kind of traditional training I needed. “When can I arrive?” I asked, fantasizing about Instagrammable sunflower fields and tiramisu with cream thick and golden from European eggs — the envy it would all inspire.

And oh, the pleasure of having a fantasy actualized! I arrived in Siena early on a bright June morning, to crowds of Italians barking at each other and smoking furiously. A twenty-minute taxi ride, reduced to ten by the Italian cadence, took me through rambling farmland flanked by dramatic rocky mountains. The villa looked exactly like the Google Street View I had spent the past three months lurking on. The building had the stately gravitas of a different century, a historic, I thought as I lugged my suitcase up the ancient steps. .