Travel Recommendation: Italy - Cooking School - Delicious Results

As one who always likes to share exceptional travel experiences, here’s my latest recommendation—Il Campo Cucina, a weeklong cooking vacation with former San Diegan, now-local Marlane Miriello in the medieval Tuscan village of Radicondoli.

Photo by Cynthia Dial 

Here’s the deal.  The weeklong instruction includes four hands-on cooking classes, each taught by a different instructor from the village or surrounding area.  Everyone stays together in a country inn with private or semiprivate rooms or in a farmhouse with apartments.  Each morning there is a shared buffet breakfast in the dining room followed by a cooking class, an excursion or a hike through the countryside and a leisurely lunch.  In the evenings, everyone dines together in a village trattoria or a farmhouse dining room.

An example of one of the edible creations: spinach stuffed eggs with garden greens, marigolds and daisies.  Can you say beautifully delicious?

Del Mar, CA, residents Debbie and Tom Tucker were at Il Campo Cucina in 2011 and are returning this summer.  Full of accolades, Debbie “loved being Italian for the week." Prior to Il Campo, Tom's culinary skills consisted of a killer breakfast sandwich.  Period.  Within days of returning home, he went to Little Italy and purchased a pasta machine and bags of special pasta flour.  Now when the Tuckers invite guests for dinner, Tom throws the guys aprons and teaches them how to make pasta from scratch as the ladies supervise with glasses of wine. 

Another Il Campo Cucina “graduate,” Elie Cole, Portland, OR, provided the perfect summation: “This is so much more than a cooking school!  It’s the key to unlock the door to a Tuscany you’d never find through any guidebook or website.”

For more information, go here..