Don’t get me wrong, this is a beautiful thing. A lucky thing. Then again, there’s an oh-so-menial downside here: At times, you’re not in it for the ballet—no matter how spectacular. At times, you’re merely in it to be fed. To sit somewhere, outside the confines of your own apartment, and feel sated. To drink, eat, converse, without muddling your way through a biblical wine list, or calculating which combination of small plates will add up to satisfaction without the added risk of bankruptcy. With that in mind, dare I ask: When did eating—and drinking—out get so complicated?

As a wine journalist, I’ve spent quite a bit of time over-intellectualizing those very lists—weighing the merit of vintages, debating between Burgundy and the Mosel, flexing to impress my assigned sommelier while searching for something that’ll pair well with the meal in question (within my admittedly limited budget). To make matters worse, I date a chef…for whom any and all meals are research—either as sources of wild inspiration, or as cautionary tales. For whom all nuances of a fine dining experience will be analyzed, digested, recorded, filed away.

In short, we love to eat out, and we hate to eat out. But for all of our respective so-called credibility in our given fields, let me tell you something true: The best meal—our favorite meal, the one we’re eternally angling to recreate—took place at a non-descript sidewalk bistrot in Paris, the two of us seated side by side (in proper European formation), arched over a waxy red checkered table cloth in the 11th arrondissement. It had begun to rain, we were hungry, and there it was: this nameless humble corner spot. We ordered steak au poivre with green salad to share from a waiter who certainly had no interest in taking our order (in turn, I yearned for nothing more than to earn his affections). When I asked for a glass of wine, bolstering myself to deliver my middling French with vague confidence, he simply peered at me over his spectacles, and asked one question: rouge ou blanc? Red or white?

Rouge, I answered, wondering if perhaps committing to a hue might produce a dedicated wine menu. He nodded, turned on his heels, and disappeared inside.

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House wine—vin maison—was once rather commonplace. Of course, you’ll still find it here and there, especially in wine-growing territories like France where even the most low-lift wines are expertly crafted. But this was once true of New York, too. Of Ohio, probably. Of London. Of Oregon. Before dining absorbed its all-encompassing air of elegance and prestige—before keeping your doors open as a restaurateur required a minimum of two stars from the New York Times—we had neighborhood restaurants. Those restaurants served house wine.

I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what that particular red vin maison was. I couldn’t tell you if the food was good. The service wasn’t particularly doting, the ambiance was not capital-C cool. But we drank, and we ate, and we talked. We were hungry, and we were fed. We laughed, and made plans. We licked the bottom of the mousse au chocolat bowl. Eventually, I managed a smile, however fleeting, from our server. He brought us glasses of Pastis on the house with a carafe of water for mixing. We sat for hours with no turn time—no forthcoming reservations to honor. None of it was remarkable, but all of it was perfect.

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At the end of the day, a return to simplicity, to the era of “house wine” dining, is all but impossible for most operators, in most cities. To keep the lights on, some sort of acclaim is required. Some ever-present Resy waitlist is essential. To embark on the masochistic, tenuous, ever-trying journey that is opening a restaurant, you ought to want to be the best. To be great. To be something. The overhead alone (nevermind the rent) in most American cities, means the neighborhood restaurant as we know it is all but impossible. It goes without saying that the balletic spots—the elite, “best of,” Michelin-accoladed places—are doing something special. They make poetry. But when I tell you this place in the 11th—this utterly unexceptional corner restaurant—made poetry too, I mean it.

There’s no solution, no logical plea to be made here, for a return to the basics. Nonetheless, there’s a certain hospitable magic that we’ve demoted in favor of shinier locales. That’s been lost, somewhere between the lengthy pages of an elegant wine list. And if you ask me, that magic can be distilled into one simple, unfussy question: Red or white?

Their fingers move with purpose. I look down at my own, soft and stubby, thick like my father’s, masked with cherry red polish and tired from typing all day. I consider what I carry into a room: my phone, on which I’m watching the short film on the Criterion Channel.

Barbagia, filmed in 1958, is an 11-minute masterpiece, my favorite of Italian director Vittorio De Seta’s ethnographic documentaries capturing the pastoral traditions of rural village life in parts of Sardinia and his native Sicily in the mid-20th century.

Set in Barbagia—the mountainous heart of central Sardinia, a rugged landscape that remains home to carefully preserved ancient traditions and indigenous languages—the short film offers a slice-of-life perspective on women in Orgosolo, Oliena, and Mamoiada, shepherd villages where their husbands spend the better part of the year tending to their flocks far from home.

There’s no soundtrack—instead, we’re immersed in the din of the villages, the metronome of church bells and honking buses and rushing streams and barking dogs, with kids shouting and kicking cans down cobbled hills.

The Shepherd’s Bread of Sardinia

By day, the women keep things running with quiet industriousness—gathering wood in the fields, scrubbing laundry in the river, bathing the children, and preparing pane dei pastori, a typical shepherd’s bread that’s dry and crispy enough to last through the long stretches the shepherds spend caring for their herds in the mountains.

Sardinia is home to over 200 types of bread. This particular Sardinian flatbread, more commonly known as pane carasau, hails from Barbagia. Fabulously, the paper-thin crisps are known throughout the rest of Italy as “sheet music,” or carta da musica, a nod to dough supposedly thin enough to read sheet music through, and to its musical crunch.

Crafted from durum wheat flour, water, yeast, and salt, it’s pita-esque at first, a thin and stretchy dough that puffs up in the oven and then is split in two. The individual rounds are baked twice, transforming into crackly flatbreads with an extended shelf life.

The Hands Behind Pane Carasau

While the exterior shots of Barbagia are transportive, the glimpses of kitchen interiors are what move me the most—copper pans lined up along the wall, the black mouth of a hearth built into the corner, an elderly nonna breathing life into a wood-fired oven.

One particular bread-baking scene has tattooed itself into my mind. It lasts less than two minutes, but I’ve watched it enough times that I remember it as a feature film. Women young and old gather around a table, hands stretching and kneading and drizzling a steady stream of water until a dough comes together. The camera trains itself on their hands as a folk song trills in the background, wrists working in unison to roll the dough into pillow-sized mounds then divide it into individual portions. There is something so intimate about the ease with which they each slip into their own worlds while sitting beside each other. Absorbed by the task at hand, their knuckles brush absentmindedly.

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Flour cakes their hands; the young women wear wedding rings. They sit on the floor, roll the dough into paper-thin disks, tuck it into thick burlap table runners that would go for $60 a pop at a boutique in Milan these days. One by one, they unfurl the disks and place them into the wood-fired oven. Branches burn in the corner of the screen as the dough bubbles up with air—a sort of helium magic, a whoopie cushion they flip over then slide onto another table in a cloud of steam. The women slice the bread open like an oyster, with a small, flat knife and sure strokes around the edges. Once cooled, they bake it again. When I think about what it means to live in community, I see their hands.

A Table Set for Everyone

Towards the end of the short, we see a family gathered by the fire for dinner—the woman ladling out a stew, sheets of torn bread splayed across the table. They’re meant to be eaten crispy or doused in olive oil, otherwise soaked in water and used to sop up cheese and meat.

In large-scale bakeries today, pane carasau is rarely made by hand—but there’s still one part of the process De Seta captured that can’t be mechanized. Once the dough rises into an airy bubble, it must be flattened and split in half by hand, a mano. Hands that hold phones, that are sometimes still—but that remember what De Seta made sure we’d never forget.

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There are still warm nights left, tomatoes at their best and plenty of reasons to eat dinner outside. Consider this our refusal to call it early, and one last ride through the world of the Cubetti Western.

This month, we’re taking you from the stands of Yankee Stadium to an imaginary Italian beach club, with a bowl of Cowboy Caviar Cubetti waiting at the end.

WHAT’S ON OUR TABLE

A night at the ballpark is one of the best things summer has to offer.

We’ve always said our protein pasta is so good, even Nonna will approve. So naturally, we brought a whole army of them to Yankee Stadium.

Our Nonna Army rolled into the Bronx and made itself right at home in the stands, bringing plenty of famiglia energy to one of New York’s most beloved summer rituals.

There’s something about going to a baseball game that makes you feel like summer might last forever. You settle into your seat, lose track of time between innings and stay until the lights come on. But add a few dozen nonnas to the mix and some cold beer on a hot summer eve, and the Bronx has never looked more Italian.

Grazie mille to the Yankees and everyone who joined the famiglia for a night we won’t soon forget.

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WHAT WE’RE LISTENING TO

What happens when a cowboy trades his horse for a Vespa and rides straight to the Italian coast? We imagine it sounds something like this.

Lido Rodeo is our soundtrack for the last beach days of summer: sun-warmed disco, Italian classics and Euro-pop best played with the windows down. Boots optional. Sunglasses essential.

Listen to Lido Rodeo on Spotify

WHAT WE’RE COOKING

Cowboy Caviar Cubetti

Every good Western deserves a sequel.

Cowboy caviar meets pasta salad in this colorful Cubetti situation built for cookouts, beach picnics and easy lunches. It’s bright, crunchy and hearty enough to hold its own as the main event—all tied together with a cumin-lime dressing.

Serves 4–6

Ingredients

• ½ box Brami Cubetti

• 1 (15-ounce) can black-eyed peas, drained and rinsed

• 1 (15-ounce) can black beans, drained and rinsed

• ½ green bell pepper, diced

• ½ red bell pepper, diced

• 1 jalapeño, diced

• 1 cup corn, fresh, canned or thawed from frozen

• 1 cup diced tomatoes

• 1 shallot, finely diced

• ¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro

For the dressing

• ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

• Juice of 1 lime, plus more to taste

• 1 teaspoon honey

• 1 garlic clove, grated

• 1 teaspoon ground cumin

• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Instructions

1. Cook the Brami Cubetti according to the package directions until al dente. Drain and let cool.

2. While the pasta cools, prepare the dressing. In a small bowl or jar, whisk together the olive oil, red wine vinegar, lime juice, honey, garlic, cumin, salt and black pepper until well combined.

3. In a large mixing bowl, combine the cooled pasta, black-eyed peas, black beans, bell peppers, jalapeño, corn, tomatoes, shallot and cilantro.

4. Pour the dressing over the salad and toss until everything is evenly coated.

5. Taste and adjust with additional lime juice and salt as needed. Enjoy!

UNTIL NEXT TIME

Consider this your permission slip to keep summer going a little longer.

Put on Lido Rodeo, make the Cowboy Caviar and take dinner outside while you still can. Summer isn’t over until we say it is.

Until the next edition,

Casa Brami

Then again, for most of us, the supreme pleasure of a just-picked tomato seems a distant, pastoral fantasy, ill-suited to the constraints of urban living. Instead, tomatoes come from the grocery store. Perhaps from the farmer’s market (for a steep mark-up). In apartment buildings — enclosed by seas of pavement rather than sprawling soil beds — or in homes with narrow, overgrown yards, it’s only logical to determine that the plausibility of raising your own perfect tomatoes is next to nonexistent.

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That said, for the tomato-devotees out there, we have some excellent news as the summer season approaches: You, too, can experience the ecstasy of slicing into your own home-grown tomatoes. That’s right, this is the summer you make your tomato-harvesting dreams a reality. The secret is this: Terroir be damned, you can grow tomato plants on rooftops, on fire escapes, in narrow strips of backyard. Which is to say, you too can enjoy fresh-from-the-vine, fruits-of-your-labor tomatoes without relocating to Laura Ingles Wilder-esque environs — all with somewhat limited effort. So, without further ado, here’s where to begin:

Seeds and seedlings

It’s only natural to begin at the beginning: the seed. You can take two different approaches here. The first is your quintessential seed (which is exceptionally inexpensive to purchase en masse). These are best for folks looking for niche or rare breeds of tomatoes, but be warned, they’re a pretty full-on commitment, and not for the faint of gardening heart. You’ll need to start growing your seeds in indoor pots (which means you’ll need light, warmth, and water) about 6-8 weeks before the winter’s final frost, so the roots can grow before you transfer them to the ground in time for summer. As they grow, you’ll transfer ‘em to larger containers, and when you start to see two to three leaves and a sturdy stem begins forming, they’ll be ready to graduate to the great outdoors!

On the other hand, for most urban gardeners—or folks without a surplus of indoor square footage to devote to a plant nursery (let’s be real…that’s all of us)—there are seedlings: Essentially, young tomato plants that have already sprouted and grown a bit. Usually about three inches tall with a few leaves sprouting, you can think of these as starter plants. You’ll find them at just about any plant or garden center, and frankly, for those of us lacking in the green thumb category, they’re far more likely to survive. Once you bring ‘em home, you’re ready to replant them and get to work.

As far as varietals go, it helps to ask the folks at your garden center what tomatoes are best for your region or climate, but for beginners, classic easy-growing fan favorite options are Early Girl (fun and easy to slice), Sungold (sweet cherry tomatoes), and Celebrity (a super disease-resistant crop).

Repotting and planting

Whether you’ve started with seeds or seedlings, by the time you have your young tomato sprouts, you’re ready to transfer your little guys to more permanent ground. Regardless of where, exactly, you’re planting, you’ll need to make there’s A+ direct sunlight available (we’re talking 6-8 hours a day). If you’re going the fire escape route, make sure you’re not choosing a place that’s eclipsed in shadow or hidden under trees. And if that’s the case, check in and see if your building has a rooftop you can use, instead.

Once you’ve picked your decadent sunny locale, if you’re planting in the ground, you’ll want to dig a deep hole in the soil (large enough to submerge at least two thirds of the plant in the ground), then remove any lower leaves, and fill in the remaining soil around the plant.

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For potted plants, you’ll want to look for a large container (think: ~10 gallons) with holes for drainage. Plastic is always a good option if you’ll need to move your plants around (plus, it’s cheap), but clay or terracotta pots are obviously more chic. Just keep in mind, if you use clay, your plants will dry out a bit quicker, so you’ll need to use more water. Fill your pot with soil, then, just as with the ground, dig a hole large enough to cover two thirds of the plant, transfer it in, then cover it back up.

Adding Support

Tomatoes, like people, need support systems…or they’ll topple under their own weight (been there). So, once your plant is safely in the ground, you’ll want to add a bit of scaffolding for the vines to grow around. For beginners, tomato cages are an easy (inexpensive) option. They’re made with three wire stakes that poke down into the soil, then they stretch up about three feet above the plant with horizontal rings for the plant to wrap around as it grows taller. The whole thing prevents the plant from falling over, and supports the fruit. That said, if you’re looking for something even simpler, you can just try a stake — as in any large piece of wood, metal, or perhaps bamboo you have lying around. An old cane might even do the trick. The only catch is, with a stake, as your tomato plant grows, you’ll need to tie the stem to your support system in notches. You can use twist-ties or a bit of twine (honestly, a hair tie will work), as you go.

Watering

Tomato! Plants! Are! Thirsty! You’ll want to water your plants often and heartily. For the most part, that means about three times a week (you’ll want to add about 1-2 inches of water), though, when your plants are still on the younger side, it’ll help to water them once daily until they’re looking sturdy. If you’re not sure whether to water, feel the top soil right around your plant. If it feels dry to the touch, that’s your cue! And keep in mind: You won’t need to water the leaves, you’re just watering the soil directly around the stem. And do your best to keep your watering practices consistent. Plants like a bit or routine, too.

Fertilizing

Fertilizing your tomato plants is definitely low-lift. You’ll just need to pick up some vegetable fertilizer, and layer it into your soil every 2-4 weeks throughout the growing season. Which is to say, you’ll only have to do it ~4 times in total. And all those good nutrients will work wonders to keep your plants happy!

Harvesting

This is the best part! Fruits of your (literal) labor! Tomatoes, ripe from the vine! You’ll know it’s time to pick when your tomatoes reach the “breaker stage”—meaning they turn from green to reddish orange. To the touch, they’ll be firm with just a little give. And depending on the varietal you’ve picked, feel free to google search an image to make sure your color is correct.

When they’re looking ready, try not to leave your tomatoes on the vine for too long, for fear that they’ll get damaged or begin to rot. And in order to pick, simply hold your tomatoes, gently twist them off at the stem, or use gardening sheers to clip them free. Then voila!

Eating

As we mentioned above, it’s perfectly acceptable to bite into your tomato whole. To slice it into pieces. To save it for sauce, salad, or soup. Regardless, know that it’s best to keep ‘em out of the fridge so the flavor stays as rich and potent as possible. In fact, for the sake of poetry, it’s probably best to eat ‘em directly off the vine (in fact, pick them in front of your dinner party guests! What could be more glamorous!). If you’re storing them, keep them face down on the counter, away from direct sunlight until you’re ready to use them. And if you’re looking for a touch of creative tomato inspiration, here are a few of our favorite summer tomato recipes:

• Tomato, Nectarine & Basil Salad

• Sweet & Savory Tomato Jam

• Tomato Tart with Garlic & Capers

• Ricotta & Roasted Tomato Bruschetta

• Spaghetti with Tomato Chile Sauce

Nothing happens. Nothing continues to happen...

Then comes a whistle, an electric guitar, a distant bell, maybe throw in a trumpet that sounds as if it has traveled across the desert specifically to tell you that someone is about to have a very bad afternoon.

Even if you have never watched a Spaghetti Western from beginning to end, you probably know the language. The impossible patience of the stare-down. The sweeping landscape interrupted by a face filling the entire screen. The mysterious stranger who arrives in town with no name, few words, and an apparently unlimited tolerance for dust.

Most of all, you know the music.

The Spaghetti Western took one of America’s most enduring myths, carried it across the Atlantic, and sent it back stranger, darker, funnier, and far more dramatic than before.

So how, exactly, did the American West come to look and sound so Italian?

Why Is It Called a Spaghetti Western?

The name was not originally intended as a compliment.

Beginning in the 1960s, Italian and other European filmmakers started producing their own Westerns, often using dry landscapes in Spain and southern Italy to stand in for the American frontier. “Spaghetti Western” became a slightly dismissive nickname for these European productions, but the films soon developed such a distinct style that the label became a genre of its own.

Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, released in 1964, became the international breakthrough. It made a star of Clint Eastwood as the poncho-wearing Man with No Name and was followed by For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the three films now known as the Dollars Trilogy.

Leone was working from a wonderfully tangled web of references. His films borrowed from the American Westerns he had grown up watching, but A Fistful of Dollars also closely followed the structure of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo. An American genre was filtered through Japanese cinema, remade by an Italian director, filmed largely in Europe, and eventually exported around the world.

Cultural cross-pollination rarely arrives wearing a poncho, but here we are.

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Italy Invents Its Own America

Spaghetti Westerns were not particularly interested in faithfully reconstructing the American West.

They were inventing a new one.

Traditional Hollywood Westerns often centered noble heroes and clear moral lines. Leone’s world was dustier and less certain. His characters lied, cheated, betrayed one another, and occasionally did the right thing for reasons that remained suspicious. They were more likely to squint than speak and often seemed to be weighing the financial upside of every human interaction.

The visual style was equally exaggerated. Leone would move from an enormous widescreen landscape to an extreme close-up of a twitching eye, a cracked lip, or a bead of sweat. Action was delayed almost beyond reason. A showdown that another director might resolve in seconds could become an entire ceremony of glances, footsteps, shifting hands, and silence.

The West was no longer simply a place. It was a stage.

Other Italian directors pushed the genre in still more directions. Sergio Corbucci’s Django became a darker, more violent variation on the wandering-gunslinger story. His later film The Great Silence, set in a bleak, snow-covered landscape, replaced the expected sun and dust with an almost suffocating cold and brought a sharper political edge to the genre.

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Then Leone made Once Upon a Time in the West, an enormous, melancholy film about railroads, violence, and a frontier being overtaken by modernity. The outlaws are still there, but their world is disappearing around them.

By that point, Italy had not simply copied the Western. It had expanded its emotional range.

It had also given it a completely new sound.

The Real Star Was the Music

The most original contribution Spaghetti Westerns made to cinema may not have come from their gunfights, landscapes, or even Leone’s famous close-ups.

It came from Ennio Morricone.

Before his partnership with Leone, Morricone had studied composition and worked across experimental music, orchestral arrangements, and Italian pop. He arranged music for major singers and brought together influences that were not supposed to occupy the same room: Bach and pop songs, folk sounds and atonality, high culture and the deeply catchy.

When he began scoring Leone’s Westerns, he did not try to imitate the lush orchestral sound associated with Hollywood’s frontier.

Instead, he whistled.

He used electric guitars, bells, cracking whips, chanting voices, choirs, anvils, unusual percussion, and trumpets that seemed to flutter above the landscape. His scores could sound ancient and futuristic in the same measure. They were playful, ominous, and occasionally almost feral.

The music did not simply accompany the images. It changed the way time worked inside the films.

In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, “The Ecstasy of Gold” builds beneath a frantic search through a cemetery until running in circles feels like a religious experience. The movie’s central theme is so recognizable that a few notes can conjure an entire desert, even when played very far from one.

In Once Upon a Time in the West, individual characters are associated with their own musical motifs. The mysterious Harmonica is not merely a man carrying an instrument. The sound announces him, explains him, and seems to haunt the film before his story has fully come into view.

Morricone understood that the sound of the West did not need to be realistic. It needed to be mythic.

That may be why his influence is now almost impossible to contain within the genre. You can hear it in action movies, animation, advertising, hip-hop, video games, and any scene that needs to communicate, very quickly, that two people are about to face off.

The Spaghetti Western gave cinema a shorthand. Morricone gave it a whistle.

Aaron’s Essential Watchlist

For Brami founder Aaron Gatti, three films form the essential starting point.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The big one.

It is funny, brutal, strangely tender, and completely committed to taking its time. The story follows three men searching for buried gold during the American Civil War, but the plot is almost secondary to the faces, landscapes, shifting alliances, and Morricone score.

It is also nearly three hours long, which means it should be approached less like casual viewing and more like hosting a small event. Make dinner. Open something good. Permit an intermission.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Leone’s most operatic Western.

Everything is wider, slower, and more melancholy. The film is not only about people fighting for land. It is about the end of the world that made those people possible.

Come for the long opening sequence. Stay for Henry Fonda playing startlingly against type and one of Morricone’s most emotionally expansive scores.

The Great Silence

A Western covered in snow.

Directed by Sergio Corbucci, The Great Silence, or Il grande silenzio, replaces the familiar dusty frontier with the frozen mountains of Utah, recreated in the Italian Dolomites. It is stark, politically charged, and unwilling to provide the comforting resolution audiences might expect.

Watch this one when you are ready for the genre’s colder, stranger edge.

Five Ways Into the Italian West

Perhaps you are intrigued but remain unconvinced that watching three men stare at one another across a dusty circle is how you would like to spend an evening.

Fair.

The influence of Spaghetti Westerns reaches far beyond films that technically belong to the genre. Here are five alternate routes in.

For Food Lovers: Tampopo

This is the most Brami route possible.

Juzo Itami’s Tampopo calls itself a “ramen Western.” It follows a truck driver who helps a widow transform her struggling noodle shop, borrowing the structure of a wandering gunslinger arriving in a town that needs saving. Around that central story, the film wanders through a series of funny, strange, and occasionally sensual vignettes about the ways food takes over our lives.

It is proof that a Western does not necessarily require horses.

Sometimes it requires broth.

For Kids: Rango

An animated lizard wanders into a desert town and accidentally becomes its sheriff.

Rango is packed with Western references, eccentric townspeople, enormous landscapes, and the kind of existential crisis rarely entrusted to a family-film reptile. It is funny enough for children and strange enough for everyone else.

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For ’90s Pop Nostalgia: Wild Wild West

Is it a Spaghetti Western? No.

Does it contain Will Smith, steampunk machinery, a giant mechanical spider, and a theme song powerful enough to lodge itself in your brain for several decades? Yes.

Not every gateway needs to be academically rigorous.

For Tarantino Fans: Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino has spent much of his career borrowing and remixing the music, structure, and iconography of Italian Westerns.

Django Unchained makes that connection especially obvious, beginning with its title and reaching back to Corbucci’s original Django. It offers a useful bridge between the genre’s older imagery and the way modern filmmakers continue to reinterpret it.

For Anyone Ready for the Real Thing: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

When in doubt, begin with the classic.

There are shorter options. There are gentler options. There are certainly films in which the characters reach their destination with greater efficiency.

But few films communicate the full scale, humor, tension, and musical power of the genre so completely.

A New Shape Rides Into Town

The part of Spaghetti Westerns we find most interesting is not that Italian filmmakers reproduced an American tradition.

It is that they looked at something familiar from another angle.

They kept the basic language of the Western but changed its rhythm, its moral universe, its faces, and its sound. The result remained recognizable while becoming entirely its own.

That balance between tradition and reinvention is one we think about often at Brami.

Cubetti is made in Molise, Italy using the traditional methods and durum wheat semolina at the heart of Italian pasta-making. But the shape itself feels unusual: tiny, square, ridged, hollow, and meant to be eaten by the spoonful.

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It looks a little like something you know and a little like something you have never seen before. Which, as the Italians proved in the 1960s, is often where things get interesting.

Let’s just say this may not be the last time you see Cubetti heading west this summer.

It has emerged as an antidote to burnout and to a version of wellness that can feel expensive, time-consuming, and built around constant effort. Instead of elaborate routines or another product to buy, nonna-maxxing celebrates habits that sound almost radically ordinary: cooking from scratch, walking often, doing things by hand, spending time with people you love, and putting your phone down long enough to notice where you are.

Nothing is hurried simply for the sake of efficiency. The day is not treated like a something to optimize.

That is part of why the idea feels so good right now. It offers a way of living that seems softer, slower, and more accessible. You do not need a membership or a perfectly designed morning routine to begin. You can shop for fresh ingredients, cook instead of ordering, walk when you are able, wear what is practical, and spend less of your day scrolling.

But the deeper appeal of nonna-maxxing is also what makes it difficult to replicate. These habits did not emerge in isolation. They come from a particular culture, social structure, and relationship to time. You can borrow the behaviors. Recreating the life that holds them together is more complicated.

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A Different Structure for the Day

One of the most noticeable differences in the Italian lifestyle is not any single habit, but the way the day itself is organized.

Where I spend time in Italy, the early afternoon brings a natural pause. Around one, many small shops close and people return home for lunch or rest. At first, it can be frustrating when you are trying to squeeze in one more errand and realize the town has collectively decided it can wait.

Eventually, that interruption begins to feel like the point.

Riposo is not observed everywhere in Italy in exactly the same way, especially in large cities and tourist centers. But where it remains part of daily life, it creates a boundary that many of us struggle to create for ourselves. The day cannot always be pushed forward through sheer force of will. There is a built-in moment to stop.

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By early evening, things begin again. In the summer, shops reopen, friends meet for drinks, families linger over dinner, and children run through the piazza well past the hour when an American schedule might say the day should be winding down.

People have phones, of course. Italy is not a place untouched by modern life. But the phone does not always feel like the central organizing force. Meals, conversations, and evening walks provide their own rhythm. Time passes differently when it is not constantly broken into notifications.

What Cannot Be Turned Into a Checklist

The internet tends to translate lifestyles into individual habits: eat this, wear that, walk this many steps, put your phone away at a certain hour.

But nonna-maxxing makes the most sense when the habits are viewed together.

Cooking regularly is easier when food shopping is woven into the neighborhood. Walking is more natural when daily life is designed around streets, shops, cafés, and public squares. Lingering over dinner feels less like a personal act of rebellion when the people around you are doing it too.

This is where the trend can flatten what it celebrates.

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An Italian grandmother is not living slowly because she watched a video instructing her to romanticize her morning coffee. Her routines are connected to family, place, necessity, and traditions carried across generations. They may look idyllic from the outside, but many were shaped by hard work and limited resources rather than a conscious rejection of hustle culture.

The aesthetic is easy to reproduce. The infrastructure and history are not.

Bodies, Aging, and Being Seen

On summer weekends, my family visits a small, family-run beach club that we have been going to for more than 50 years. The same local families return each season, and everyone seems to know one another.

It was there that I began noticing a difference in the way many of the older women around me inhabited their bodies.

Women of different ages and sizes wore bikinis and colorful one-pieces, swam, talked, ate, and moved through the day without seeming to organize the entire experience around how they looked. Aging was visible rather than carefully disguised.

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That does not mean Italian women are universally free from self-consciousness or that beauty standards disappear at the border. Italy has its own pressures, contradictions, and highly specific ideas about appearance.

What felt different was the presence of older women in public life. They were not hidden away or expected to dress as though visibility belonged only to the young. They were participating fully in the day.

That, more than any particular swimsuit or beauty routine, is worth paying attention to.

The Practicality Behind the Style

The same is true of the way many nonne dress.

The lightweight dresses, linen, leather sandals, slingbacks, and market-bought pieces now gathered into online mood boards are not necessarily attempts to achieve an aesthetic. They are practical responses to heat, walking, work, and the need to move between home and public life without changing three times.

The clothes often feel considered without appearing overworked. A loose cotton dress can function in the kitchen, at the market, and during an evening passeggiata. The point is not to look undone. It is to look like yourself without turning getting dressed into a full-time occupation.

Once again, the internet sees a formula. The women wearing the clothes may simply see what works.

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The Strength Behind the Softness

The strongest people I have known are the Italian grandparents in my life, and not only in the emotional sense.

Many lived through war, scarcity, migration, physical labor, and years structured very differently from our own. They grew food, cared for animals, raised families, and kept households moving with far fewer conveniences than we take for granted.

My own nonno lived through more than most people should have to experience as a young boy. Those stories could fill a book. That history stayed with him, but so did a remarkable physical and emotional resilience. He survived cancer twice in his eighties.

It would be easy to turn that endurance into another lesson about the benefits of olive oil, walking, or a positive attitude. But longevity is never that simple. Genetics, access to care, economic conditions, community, chance, and countless other factors shape a life.

Still, there is something to learn from a culture in which older people remain active participants in family and community life rather than becoming invisible at its edges.

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More Than a Trend

When I began seeing nonna-maxxing everywhere, it felt familiar.

The habits themselves are not wrong. Cooking more, walking when possible, spending time with other people, using your hands, and stepping away from the internet can make a day feel fuller and less frantic.

But these practices are not magic because they are Italian, and they cannot be fully understood as isolated wellness hacks.

They come from a way of life in which food is connected to place, rest is sometimes protected by the structure of the day, public spaces invite people to gather, and older generations remain close enough to shape how younger people live.

Perhaps the best thing to take from nonna-maxxing is not a wardrobe, a recipe, or an imagined version of a Mediterranean morning.

It is the reminder that a good life is rarely built through constant self-improvement. More often, it is held together by ordinary rituals, repeated over time, in the company of other people.

Those rituals can be borrowed.

The world that taught them to us deserves to be understood, too.

This month, we launched Cubetti, our newest pasta shape and our very first designed to be eaten by the heaping spoonful. Then, because a new pasta shape deserves a proper introduction, we spent eight straight days sharing pasta salad recipes with it.

If you’ve never heard of Cubetti before, you’re not alone. It’s small, square, hollow, ridged, and surprisingly architectural. Think of it as a squared ditalini, with six faces and plenty of corners for dressing, herbs, cheese, and all the good bits at the bottom of the bowl to get caught up in.

It’s a shape that’s rare even in Italy and incredibly hard to find in the U.S. (we think we may be the first to do it here). We developed it with our pasta production partners in Molise, Italy, pushing what was possible with traditional bronze extrusion to create something that feels both distinctly Italian and completely new.

We hope you love Cubetti just as much as we do.

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Get 15% off through July 6 with code SUMMEROFPASTA

What’s On Our Table

Our smallest (and dare we say, cutest) shape yet taught us a few things this month.

First: spoonable pasta is deeply underrated and highly functional.

There is something so very satisfying about getting pasta, dressing, cheese, vegetables, and whatever else you have piled into the bowl all in one perfect bite. No chasing peas around the plate, no bit of tomato left behind. Cubetti keeps everything together, which is really all we ask of pasta and, occasionally, of life.

Second: pasta salad is the food of the summer, and has absolutely zero rules.

We think of pasta fredda dishes as a format, and a very generous one, at that.

It can be creamy or bright, a vehicle for familiar flavors or totally unexpected, built for a backyard cookout or eaten directly from the fridge by the heap-ful. It can lean Italian deli, charred lemon and basil, pickles, seafood, sun-dried tomato pesto, or absolutely wherever else your refrigerator takes you. Chilled pasta dishes truly have bounds.

To celebrate the launch, we handed Cubetti over to some of our favorite chefs, creators, and food brands and asked them to show us what pasta salad could be.

Jeri Mobley of Whisper of Yum kicked things off with charred lemon, grilled corn, crispy prosciutto, and a creamy basil-feta dressing. Sara Tane and Shakayla Felice brought their own summer points of view. Fishwife, Freestyle Snacks, Smash Kitchen, and California Olive Ranch took Cubetti into entirely different corners of the pantry.

Freestyle turned it into the pickle pasta salad of our ’90s dreams, complete with cheddar and a creamy pickle-brine dressing. California Olive Ranch paired it with a glossy sun-dried tomato pesto, arugula, Parmesan, and toasted pine nuts.

Different recipes, totally different flavors, but all using the same small but mighty shape that holds on to every last bit. We could tell you that Cubetti’s ridges and hollow center make it especially good at capturing ingredients, but we decided to show you instead.

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Third: some of the best things in life require little effort, but plenty of patience.

Pasta salad is one of those foods that just gets better as it sits. After throwing ingredients together, the dressing settles into the ridges, vegetables release a little flavor, and everything just gets better acquainted in the refrigerator.

It is food that rewards making it before your friends arrive, which means less time fussing in the kitchen and more time actually being part of the gathering.

A very Italian outcome, even if the pasta salad itself is wonderfully American.

What We’re Listening To

A new pasta shape naturally called for a new playlist.

This month’s Cubetti soundtrack was curated by our founder, Aaron, with the same energy as the shape itself: playful, lively, and made for moving around the kitchen.

It is best played while chopping more herbs than the recipe may call for, carrying a very large bowl of pasta salad somewhere sunny, or on a picnic blanket with friends.

There is a particular kind of music that makes cooking feel less like getting dinner done and more like the beginning of the evening, and this is just that.

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What We’re Cooking

Because seven days of pasta salad were not quite enough, we are bringing you one more before the long holiday weekend.

Our Italian Sub Pasta Salad is everything we love about a very good deli sandwich, rearranged for a bowl.

Cubetti gets tossed with salami, provolone, green olives, tomatoes, pepperoncini, red onion, and chives, then coated in a creamy red wine vinegar dressing with Dijon, garlic, honey, and Italian seasoning.

It is salty, tangy, creamy, a little crunchy, and full of the tiny pieces you want in every bite. In other words, exactly the kind of thing Cubetti was made for.

Make it before the cookout, then let it hang out in the fridge. Oh, and don’t forget to bring the biggest serving spoon you own.

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Until Next Time

We will be back next month with another Edicola.

Until then, here is your reminder that tradition does not have to stand still to remain meaningful.

One of our favorite things about pasta is that there is always room for another shape, another sauce, and another way to bring people around the table. Cubetti may be new, but the idea behind it is very old: make something with care, then share it generously.

We just got back from Italy, and we’re still somewhere between unpacking our suitcases, sorting through approximately one billion photos, and trying to figure out how to make frozen sweets for breakfast a normal thing in America.

It was a BIG month for Brami: a return to Aaron’s grandparents home in Tuscany, a few days in Sicily with creators we love, many bowls of pasta, many long tables, and a whole lot of talking about why this brand started in the first place.

For us, this trip was all about going back to the source. The source of our ingredients, point of view, relationship to food, and the very Italian way of living we aim to bring into the modern American household on an everyday basis.

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We talk a lot about Italian lifestyle at Brami, but never want it to feel like a faraway fantasy or something reserved for summer vacations. To us, it’s much more meaningful than that. It’s cooking something incredibly simple, gathering around the table with people who light you up, and taking pleasure—not life—seriously. In a lot of ways, this trip felt like research. (Very delicious research, but research nonetheless.)

We gathered endless field notes on the way people cook, eat, host, shop, linger, and move through the day in the places that shaped Brami—and Aaron—from the very beginning.

We met up in Rome before heading to Tuscany, to the home we’ve long called Villa Brami: Aaron’s grandparents’ house, where he spent summers growing up and where the earliest seeds of the idea that became Brami were planted. But during this trip, a new name for our birthplace arose, and we’ve started calling it something that feels more true: Casa Brami. As romantic as “villa” sounds, this place is not a hotel or a backdrop or some polished version of Italian life. It’s a real home. A family home. The kind of place where people have cooked, eaten, argued, laughed, left, returned to, and sat around a table for generations. And this trip revealed that distinction really matters to us.

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Brami has never been about making Italian living feel out aspirational or reserved for vacation. It’s about making the best parts of it feel more at home.

So as we keep telling this story, Villa Brami is becoming Casa Brami: a name that feels warmer, more lived-in, and closer to what we hope this place can become one day for our community. Until then, we documented so much of this special place and can’t wait to share it with you all very shortly.

What’s On Our Table

From Tuscany, we traveled south to Sicily, where our team hosted six creators from the Brami community for a few days at Casa Lawa, a magical home tucked beneath Mt. Etna.

According to myth, even the gods once fought over who would reign over Sicily: one drawn to the fire beneath the mountains, the other to the ancient crops growing in its soil. Lupini and semolina, the two ingredients at the foundation of every Brami product, both have roots on this island.

Being there felt like a homecoming to the ingredients at the very core of what we do every day. And getting to bring along some of the people helping us tell the Brami story made it even more special. Community is not something you build only through a screen. It happens around tables, in kitchens, during long travel days, and in the small in-between moments you least expect.

More than anything, Sicily reminded us that with enough pasta and a little bit of magic, strangers can become friends and a few days away can change the way you come home. So this month, what’s on our table is really the lessons we brought back with us.

First: granita for breakfast.

We ate it basically every morning in Sicily and, honestly, we’re changed for the better. Almond was the group favorite and a regional classic: cold, refreshing, usually served with a soft brioche and fresh panna, and somehow not too sweet. It’s the kind of ritual that makes perfect sense once you’re there and immediately makes American breakfast feel like it could use a little more whimsy.

If you missed it, we shared a guide to ordering gelato and granita like a local last week. Consider this your sign to study up before your next trip.

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Second: the unfussy long table.

At Casa Lawa, meals had that rare feeling of being thoughtfully orchestrated but never overly controlled. A few striped, colorful linens, generous platters, plenty of passing things around, and suddenly dinner became the main event of our trip without anyone having to announce that it was.

The best hosting lesson we brought home: don’t over-style the table to the point that people are afraid to touch it. Let it breathe. Let the food do some of the decorating. Let people reach across one another. That’s usually where the best parts of the night begin.

And finally: pistachios. on. everything.

Sweet, savory, crushed over pasta, folded into sauces, scattered over desserts. Sicily reminded us how much flavor can come from one ingredient when it’s treated with respect. Pistachios showed up everywhere on the trip, and we’ve been thinking about them ever since.

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What We’re Listening To

The Casa Lawa team embodied so much of the Italian lifestyle we’re always trying to translate through Brami: generosity and beauty that feels creative, abundant, and totally full of ease. There were long tables and many bowls of pasta shared, a giant tiramisu that the Casa Lawa team so delicately stenciled our name atop, and an Italodisco DJ set under Mt. Etna on our last night that we are still not emotionally over (more on that in a sec…).

There are certain nights that become a reference point almost immediately, and this was one of them. This month’s playlist is inspired by the cool air (it’s surprisingly chilly at the base of Etna in May), volcanic terroir, and music that night.

It’s retro, transportive, and a little glittery, best played while cooking dinner with the windows open and/or bopping around with friends this summer.

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What We’re Cooking

This month’s recipe is inspired by Sicily, where pistachios, seafood, citrus, and pasta all seem to show up on the same plate effortlessly.

Pistachio and Shrimp Spaghetti was a dish that surprised us in each interpretation we tasted: it’s the perfect balance of richness from pistachios without feeling heavy and brightness from herbs and lemon without being sharp. The sauce comes together with toasted pistachios, olive oil, garlic, lemon, and a splash of pasta water, which turns everything glossy and silky without any dairy.

It’s the kind of dish we want to make when we’re missing Sicily but still very much cooking from a tiny city kitchen.

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Sicilian-Inspired Pistachio & Shrimp Spaghetti

Serves 2–4

Ingredients

• 8 oz Brami Spaghetti

• ½ lb shrimp, peeled and deveined

• 1 handful basil

• ½ cup shelled pistachios, toasted, plus more for serving

• 2 cloves garlic, minced

• Zest and juice of 1 lemon

• ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil, plus more as needed

• ¼ cup grated Pecorino or Parmesan, optional

• ½ tsp chili flakes, optional

• Salt and black pepper, to taste

• Fresh basil or parsley, for serving

Instructions

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt it generously.

2. Add the spaghetti and cook until al dente. Right before draining, reserve at least 1 cup of pasta water.

3. While the pasta cooks, make the pistachio sauce. In a food processor, pulse the toasted pistachios, handful of basil, one clove of garlic, lemon zest, a pinch of salt, black pepper, and olive oil until finely ground and paste-like. Add a splash of pasta water to loosen. It should be textured, not completely smooth.

4. In a large pan, warm a drizzle of olive oil over medium heat. Add the remaining garlic and chili flakes, if using, and cook until fragrant.

5. Add the shrimp, season with salt and pepper, and cook for 1–2 minutes per side, until pink and just cooked through. Remove a few shrimp and set aside for topping, if you want the final plate to look especially nice.

6. Lower the heat and add the cooked spaghetti to the pan, followed by the pistachio sauce and a splash of pasta water. Toss until glossy, adding more pasta water as needed to help the sauce coat the noodles.

7. Finish with lemon juice, Pecorino or Parmesan if using, and another drizzle of olive oil.

8. Serve topped with the reserved shrimp, more crushed pistachios, herbs, and a final hit of lemon zest.

Until Next Time

We’ll be back next month with another note from us, to you.

Until then, here’s your reminder that one of the best things we get from travel is not something you can quite capture in a photo or pack in your suitcase. It’s the expanded perspective you bring home with you: the realization that there are so many beautiful ways to live in our big beautiful world, and we all have something to learn by bearing witness.

In Sicily, for example, granita is even more important to know. It’s a semi-frozen dessert made with water, sugar, and fresh ingredients like almond (the most classic flavor), pistachio (a close second, in my opinion), mulberry (in season right now), coffee, lemon, or other fruits. It’s lighter and icier than gelato, closer in texture to a very fine shaved ice or sorbet, but with its own distinct ritual. In the summer, many Sicilians eat granita topped with panna (fresh whipped cream) for breakfast with brioche col tuppo, the island’s signature sweet bun. So if you’re in Sicily, granita with panna and a brioche is often a more local order than gelato altogether (and even before 12pm, at that). (Hot tip: Coffee granita with cream is especially popular in cities like Catania.)

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That’s the first rule: order for where you are.

In Northern Italy, gelato tends to be richer, creamier, and more dairy-forward. Locals often order classic flavors that sound simple but reveal a lot about the quality of the shop. Stracciatella—milk gelato threaded with delicate shards of chocolate—originated in the north and remains one of Italy’s most beloved flavors. Crema, a custard-like flavor made with egg yolks, is another staple, along with fiordilatte, a pure milk gelato that lets the quality of the dairy speak for itself. Zabaione, inspired by the classic egg-and-Marsala dessert, also reflects the richer flavor profile common in colder northern regions.

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In Piedmont, hazelnut and chocolate are the flavors to look for. This is where nocciola and gianduia dominate menus, thanks to the region’s prized hazelnuts and Turin’s long chocolate-making history. A very local order here might simply be nocciola and dark chocolate: rich, understated, and deeply flavorful without being overly sweet.

Further south in Tuscany, the flavors are often more restrained and seasonal. Fiordilatte, crema, honey, walnut, and fresh fruit flavors are common, especially in smaller towns where gelaterias reflect what’s freshest at the local market. Strawberry and mulberry appear in late spring, peach and apricot in summer, fig later in the season. A good ordering rule here: pair one cream flavor with one fruit flavor. It keeps the cup balanced instead of overly rich.

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Flavors tend to get brighter, nuttier, and more produce-driven. Pistacchio made with nuts from Bronte, a small town near Mount Etna famous for producing some of Italy’s best pistachios, is one of Sicily’s defining flavors. Almond, mulberry, lemon, blood orange, and jasmine are also closely tied to Sicily’s agriculture and climate.

Along the Amalfi Coast and throughout much of Campania, citrus reigns supreme. Lemon gelato and lemon sorbet are especially popular because the region’s lemons are famously fragrant and sweet. Coffee flavors also appear often throughout southern Italy, where espresso culture is woven into daily life.

In Calabria, one of the most distinctive flavors is gelato alla liquirizia, or licorice gelato. Calabria is known for producing some of Italy’s best licorice root, and the flavor is intensely local: herbal, savory-sweet, and often nearly black in color. It can surprise visitors who are used to a very different kind of licorice, but locals prize it for its boldness and depth, especially when paired with citrus.

That connection between flavor and place is part of what makes gelato culture in Italy feel so different.

Gelato is not treated like a once-in-a-while vacation treat. It’s part of daily life. Teenagers stop for it after school. Families take evening walks with small cups after dinner. Friends sit outside cafés in the piazza late into the evening. Because locals eat gelato often, they become highly attuned to quality—and deeply loyal to favorite neighborhood shops.

The best gelaterias are rarely the ones with the tallest piles, brightest colors, or longest tourist lines. They’re often the quieter places locals return to night after night.

A few ways to order more like them:

• Look for flavors that make sense for the region. Pistachio in Sicily, hazelnut in Piedmont, citrus along the Amalfi Coast, licorice in Calabria.

• Pay attention to the season. If it’s late spring, strawberry may be worth ordering. In summer, look for peach, apricot, lemon, almond, or granita. Later in the season, fig is a good sign.

• Don’t overlook the simple flavors. Fiordilatte, crema, stracciatella, and nocciola are often the best tests of a gelateria’s quality.

• Pair with balance in mind. One cream flavor and one fruit or nut flavor is usually a safer bet than stacking three heavy flavors together.

• Skip the towering piles. Great gelato is usually stored in covered metal tins or displayed modestly, not whipped into huge, colorful mounds.

• And when in doubt, ask what’s best today. In a good gelateria, the answer will usually tell you exactly what you need to know.

Words by Carissa Tozzi.

While March was all about welcoming the first signs of spring in NYC, April led us to following them outside.

This month, the table moved with us: from an intimate cooking class in SoHo to the west coast for a communal dinner with 100 strangers. There were long shared tables, new friends made, and many, many bowls of pasta.

At Brami, hospitality isn’t just something we like to talk about. It’s something that’s core to who we are and what we believe in, and we actually take the time to build around it. But we believe hosting doesn’t need to be precious, either. It’s often the most casual gatherings that feel the most special, and the most easily arranged tables that end up the most beautiful.

April was also a big reminder to us that seasonal eating isn’t only about what’s growing (since that’s still very little in NYC), it’s also about letting the season change the pace of the way you live and gather.

Without further ado…

What’s On Our Table

A few things shaping the way we hosted in April.

First: fresh-cut flowers. At In-Season Malibu, our first spring dinner in a four-part series celebrating seasonal cooking and eating, the table was dressed with local flowers from the farm itself. Fresh flowers are special on their own, sure, but a few stems and a pop of color is really all you need to make a table feel alive and intentional.

Also inspired by our Malibu dinner: long communal tables are so in. (But were they ever really out?) Dining family style with strangers has an incredibly effective way of breaking the ice before the main course has even rolled out, and drums up the kind of energy that instantly tells people: please, whatever you do, feel free to linger. There’s something so kind and nurturing about passing and serving food across a table to people you’ve never met before, in a world where we so often are rewarded for putting ourselves first.

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We also have to mention tableside dessert, because what’s more fun than dinner and a show? (Perhaps, dessert and a show?) Earlier this month in NYC, Brami friend and chef Emerald Chan led five giveaway winners and their guests through a cooking class hosted by Halley Kate. The crew made gochugaru alla vodka and pesto with peas and zucchini, but the true star of the night was a tableside tiramisu, finished with cream the group very much earned after whipping by hand all night. Tableside dessert might sound elaborate, but it’s actually one of the most functional and non-precious ways to end the night on a sweet note (no leaving your table of guests to fuss in the kitchen or plating beforehand).

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What We’re Listening To

This month’s hosting soundtrack was Coachella-inspired: a little transportive to warmer days ahead, and made for the kind of dinner where the playlist should last til after clean up is done.

It’s what we played through our April events, and what we’re keeping on repeat for any spring gathering that starts before sunset and ends later than expected.

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What We’re Cooking

At In-Season Malibu, guests moved through a market-style Brami farmstead stocked with produce from Thorne Family Farm and everything they needed to recreate the evening’s pasta at home. It was part recipe, part take-home dinner prep—a way to extend the meal beyond the meal itself.

The recipe came from the kitchen of Chef Rahul Khopkar: Lemony Broccolini & Kale Curly Mac. It’s bright and green, and exactly what we want to eat when spring produce starts getting good but dinner still needs to feel satisfying.

The real trick is cooking the greens with the pasta, saving your pasta water, and building a quick sauce in the same pot. Nothing fussy, and very little cleanup (our favorite duo). A great reminder that when your ingredients are good, you don’t have to do that much.

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Lemony Broccolini & Kale Curly Mac

From the kitchen of Chef Rahul Khopkar

Ingredients

Brami Curly Mac pasta
2–3 small stalks broccolini
Handful of kale
1 lemon, juice and zest
Olive oil
3 garlic cloves, minced
Chili flakes, optional
Parmesan or nutritional yeast
Oregano, salt, and pepper, to taste

Instructions

1. Salt the water like the sea. Wait for a full boil, then add more salt than you think. Pro tip: about 2 tablespoons per 12 cups of water.

2. Toss in the pasta and stir for the first minute. While the pasta cooks, chop your broccolini and kale into bite-sized pieces.

3. Taste, don’t time. The box says 9–11 minutes, but trust your bite more than your clock. Aim for al dente: not crunchy, but firm. Add the broccolini to the pasta water when you have about 6 minutes left, then add the kale when 2–3 minutes of cooking time remain.

4. Right before draining, scoop out ½ cup of pasta water. It’s liquid gold for sauce. Drain the pasta, kale, and broccolini together. Set aside, and don’t rinse.

5. In the same pot, make a quick sauce. Cook the garlic in olive oil until fragrant, then add lemon juice, lemon zest, oregano, salt, pepper, and chili flakes, if using. Whisk in a splash of pasta water to bring it together.

6. Reunite the pasta and greens with the sauce in a hot pan. Add another splash of pasta water as needed, then add Parmesan or nutritional yeast and stir again.

7. Simmer. Swirl. Taste. Serve.

8. Optional garnish: more pecorino, a drizzle of olive oil, and your best herbs.

Until Next Time

We’ll be back next month with another Edicola.

Until then, here’s your reminder that with every season comes a new opportunity for what to cook and how to gather. You just have to go outside and listen!

Call it The Lingering Phase: that tipsy blur of conversation, elbows on the table, no one quite ready to call it quits. Dinner’s epilogue has a certain staying power.

In the quintessential American household, this is often where dessert enters. Cakes, puddings, ice creams, something sweet and plated and proper. Lovely, yes—but also, sometimes, a little disruptive. Dessert can require the host to leave the table, swap plates, fetch utensils, plate pastries, whip cream, turn the evening from loose and flowing into something suddenly staged.

The very act of transitioning from savory to sweet can change the texture of the night. The pace shifts. The spell breaks.

There is, however, a better final act. One that is already commonplace in places like Italy and France, where the art of dining is treated with a level of devotion the U.S. rarely maintains.

The after-dinner cheese course.

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Think of it this way: minimal fuss, maximum decadence. Maybe it’s a few slices of pear with blue cheese, fresh cherries with a gooey sheep’s milk cheese, dark chocolate with nutty Comté. Maybe there are no accoutrements at all—just crumbles of Parmesan plucked with your fingers.

Unlike a capital-D Dessert, after-dinner cheese is not really about hunger, or even satiation. It’s about flavor, texture, and staying in your seat long enough to finish your wine and your sentence.

Let me be clear: I have a violent sweet tooth. But that might be exactly why after-dinner cheese feels so alluring. It does not compete with dessert so much as offer a different kind of pleasure: quieter, saltier, more tactile, and easier to fold into the natural rhythm of the table.

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It is one more thing to relish passively. One more reason to linger.

And the best part is that it does not need to be precious. After-dinner cheese can be elegant, but it can also be assembled from whatever is already in your fridge, pantry, or fruit bowl. A wedge, a spoonful, a handful, a drizzle. That is the point.

To that end, just about anything can take the form of an after-dinner cheese course. It can be savory, spicy even. It can be served with grapes, strawberries, peach slices. With nuts, nougat, or plain old Hershey’s Kisses. Frankly, just about anything you have lying in the pantry can be made useful here: pools of honey, crunchy granola, fig jam, meaty dates.

That said, if you were in the market for a touch of post-meal cheese advice, there are a few simple things to keep in mind.

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Add one sweet thing

With minimum effort, it’s nice to add something to the plate that’ll satisfy the sweet tooth. A puddle of honey for dipping, fresh fruit, chocolate, jam, candied nuts—it really doesn’t matter. Look for finger foods, or anything in your kitchen that can bring a touch of sweetness to the mix.

This is not about building a perfect board. It is about creating a small, edible excuse to keep sitting.

Keep it tactile

Speaking of finger foods, this is the primal part of the meal. Any inhibitions—if there were any to begin with—have long since disintegrated. Everything, at this stage, ought to be oriented toward pure and simple pleasure: the tactile beauty of eating aged Gouda in bites with your hands.

No need to clear plates or put out fresh ones. No need to skew precious. This is about the unfiltered joy of salt and aged dairy while jokes are told, anecdotes completed, advice given.

Choose the cheese by mood, not by rules

Should you wish to be prescriptive about it, there are a few nuttier, sweet-toned cheeses that make particularly excellent post-meal companions. But let the record show: a mound of waxless Babybel rounds, or perhaps even a wreath of Polly-O cheese sticks, would absolutely do the trick.

Sweet, lactic cheeses like Brie—or its richer counterpart, Brillat-Savarin—pair brilliantly with honey, and they’re just decadent enough to feel like real dessert. Anything with a bloomy rind will generally work here. Camembert is an equally excellent option. Try it with dried apricots or walnuts, and it might just change your life.

On the nuttier end of things, in the realm of hard cheeses, you might go with something more robust, like sharp cheddar paired with crisp red apple. Or maybe something a bit more subtle, like Muenster with just about any fresh fruit you have on hand, or Comté with almonds.

When it comes to aged Gouda, you’ll get flavor notes that are almost caramel-esque—which is to say, if you’ve got actual caramel of any kind lying around, don’t be afraid to bring it out. Cooked-down fruit will taste just as good.

And on the stronger front, Roquefort or classic blue cheese both make for a gorgeous final act. They pair beautifully with dark chocolate, or dark fruits like blackberries, cherries, or dried cranberries.

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Above all, do less

Nevertheless, there are no real rules. The point is a simple one: the full-fat, rich-as-hell pleasure of letting the table last a little longer. One more drink. One more bite. One more bit of sensory pleasure before the night dissolves.

An epilogue to one of the most remarkable phenomena we have access to as human beings: an unfussy meal, in good company.

Words by Eliza Dumais.

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Nothing here feels performative. People move through the town on bicycles, following the same routes they always have to the beach, to coffee, to dinner. Designer storefronts of Prada, Gucci, Loro Piana and the like sit quietly along the main streets, more presence than display. Behind them, villas remain largely unseen, hidden beyond gates and hedges. Beach clubs line the shore in precise rows of umbrellas and private cabins, often held by the same families year after year. Mornings carry salty air; evenings unfold slowly with aperitivo, long dinners, a walk through town.

And then, once a week, that rhythm completely shifts.

Set just behind the main promenade and anchored around Piazza Marconi, Forte dei Marmi’s Wednesday market unfolds across multiple streets; A labyrinth of white tents extending further than you expect, everything moving as one continuous scene, almost impossible to take in all at once.

It’s not just fresh ingredients and well-crafted essentials (all distinctly Italian, of course), but clothing, textiles, antiques, and pieces for the home. Fashion takes center stage: pure cashmere sweaters in soft, neutral stacks, often for under a hundred euros; linen shirts and dresses in sun-washed tones that feel made for this coastline; hand-cut leather belts and bags that deepen in character with time. Elsewhere, shoes and jewelry sit alongside vintage furniture, small works of art, books, and collected objects—a mix that feels both timeless and quietly current. Tables are set with crisp linen, glazed pottery, and light-catching glassware, the kind of pieces that move easily from shelf to table without ceremony. If antiques are your instinct, this is the kind of place that feels second nature.

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Markets like this exist all over Italy, each shaped by the people who shop there. In smaller towns, they’re more practical. In cities, they skew younger. This isn’t an event or a place to grab a souvenir—it’s how people live and shop, interacting with the same craftsmen and sellers they’ve encountered for years

The longer you stay in Forte, the more the maze of its market starts to make sense. You slow down, adjust, and begin to move with it. By noon, people drift toward the beach, toward long lunches, toward shade. By early afternoon, the market is gone. By evening, the town resets.

When the market returns, it will be exactly where it always is: in Piazza Marconi, every Wednesday morning, and in the summer, again on Sundays—unfolding the same way it always has, part of a rhythm that doesn’t need to change.

Words by Carissa Tozzi.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in NYC this month, it’s that—as most good things worth waiting for—spring doesn’t arrive all at once.

It shows up in the first spritz with friends outside, in a sudden craving for something greener and lighter, or in the way that it’s finally still light out on the way home from work. At Brami, these seasonal shifts are the things we pay attention to most. Not just what’s in season, but how the season changes the way we want to cook, gather, and live.

That’s part of what brings us to this new monthly edition on Substack…

In Italy, an edicola is a neighborhood newsstand—the kind tucked into a street corner where you stop for newspapers, magazines, and small cultural curiosities before continuing on with your day. We loved the idea of creating our own version here: a monthly dispatch from the Brami world, shaped by the flavors, rituals, sounds, and small pleasures inspiring us right now.

Think of it as an extension of what we care about most: the oh-so-Italian everyday art of enjoying life a little more.

This first issue is about early spring—the in-between season when winter hasn’t fully let go, but your appetite has already started moving on.

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Without further ado…

What’s On Our Table

A few things shaping the way we’re hosting this month.

First: fresh tulips, because nothing brings spring indoors faster. A few bunches on the table or by the sink instantly brighten the room, especially when slightly unruly, as if they just sprung up from the ground.

Then there’s the fish-shaped stainless steel lemon squeezer from Gohar World, which is exactly the kind of object we’re always drawn to: chic enough to leave out on the table and equally as functional. We always have lemon around when people come over—for squeezing over pasta, brightening up a salad, or dropping into water—and this object feels so intentional.

And because not every gathering needs to start from scratch, we’ve also been loving a jar of Carbone spicy vodka sauce in the rotation. For dairy-free friends, we love warming it up with a splash of coconut cream, which softens the heat and gives it that silky, indulgent feel without much traditional heavy cream.

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What We’re Listening To

This month’s soundtrack that powered us through Expo West: Italodisco.

If you’re not familiar, Italodisco is the glittery, synth-heavy dance music that came out of Italy in the late ’70s and ’80s—dramatic, transportive, and just the right amount of over-the-top. It’s the kind of music that instantly changes the energy of a room.

For us, it’s best listened to while cooking with the windows open, pouring something cold, and letting dinner take a little longer than it needs to.

This month’s playlist was curated by our founder, Aaron Gatti, who grew up between Italy and the U.S. and has a deep love for the music, rituals, and everyday pleasures that inspired Brami in the first place. The result is a mix that feels retro, joyful, and perfect for a kitchen dance break while something good simmers on the stove.

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What We’re Cooking

March cooking is a funny thing. The sturdy vegetables of winter are still hanging around, but what you really want is brightness—something green, garlicky, and vibrant.

One of our favorite ways to cook this time of year is by using the parts of vegetables that usually get thrown away.

Radish greens are the perfect example. Peppery and packed with flavor, they make an incredible pesto—and turning them into pasta sauce is one of the easiest ways to reduce food waste while stretching what you already have in your fridge.

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This Radish Greens Pesto Pasta, courtesy of our friend Kiln & Kitchen has been on repeat in our kitchen lately.

Radish Greens Pesto Pasta

Ingredients

Greens from 2 bunches of radishes, washed and dried (about 2 packed cups)
2 cloves garlic
Juice from ½ lemon
¼ cup slivered almonds
¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil, plus more as needed
Salt and pepper to taste

6 oz Brami Fusilli
5 radishes, sliced into thin half moons
1 cup sugar snap peas, halved

Instructions

Cook pasta according to package instructions. Drain and set aside to cool.

In a food processor, combine radish greens, garlic, lemon juice, almonds, Parmesan cheese, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Process until smooth, scraping down the sides as needed.

In a large bowl, add the cooled pasta, radish greens pesto, sliced radishes, and sugar snap peas. Toss until everything is evenly coated.

Taste, adjust seasoning, and enjoy.

Serves 4.

Until next time

We’ll be back next month with another Edicola.

Until then, here’s your reminder that spring doesn’t need to be fully here to be felt. <3

We live in Pontremoli, a small medieval city in northern Tuscany, set between the Apennine mountains and the Ligurian coast, where stone streets wind beneath the 10th-century Piagnaro Castle. Each year, we return to a small vintage design shop tucked into its historic center—a tightly edited collection of statement pieces, the kind that anchor a room. It’s the kind of place you would never expect to find here, which is largely what adds to its allure.

In a place like this—where families stay for generations—things don’t get thrown away. They circulate.

The shop, Rovistando Vintage & Design, reveals itself slowly. The storefront holds only a handful of pieces (carefully placed, but never crowded). A chair in patinated leather, walnut credenza with clean, architectural lines, hand-blown Murano glass lamp catching the light—the list goes on. Italian mid-century design lives in this balance: structure and warmth, precision and ease; Materials like wood, brass, glass, and leather are shaped into forms that feel both rational and lived-in.

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This isn’t a place you browse passively.

Over time, you start to understand how the hunt works. The owner, Luca Federici, sources pieces from across Italy and Europe—homes, estates, private collections—and keeps a much larger inventory in a neighboring town. If you’re serious, he’ll even take you there.

He’ll drive you himself, in a van, to the warehouse a few miles away. My son, who has spent his entire life being told not to get into vans with strangers, was not thrilled. My husband, whose family has lived in Pontremoli for over 250 years, didn’t hesitate. Here, that kind of familiarity still means something.

The space smells like history, rows of pieces stretching further than you expect, each one waiting without urgency. It feels less like shopping and more like being let into something private.

And then you start to understand his eye.

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Pieces you’d normally only see in design collections—like an Eames airport bench by Charles and Ray Eames, originally sourced from Milan airport in the

1970s, or a glass and metal table by Gallotti & Radice—sit alongside others that feel equally considered: a sculptural chest of drawers with mirror by Georges Coslin, or a faceted Murano glass vase by Flavio Poli that catches the light in a way that stops you mid-step. Nothing is labeled or explained. You either recognize it, or you don’t.

Over multiple summers, we’ve introduced one or two pieces into our home. Two dark brown leather lounge chairs from the 1970s: low, sculptural, perfectly worn, the leather softened at the arms where someone else sat for years (see them here). A 1950s credenza that feels like a work of art but is practical enough to store balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and dried pasta, alongside hand-blown glassware, ceramic serving bowls, and silverware passed down through our family. Nothing matches exactly, but everything belongs.

We pair them with older, traditional, Italian-made furniture, including dressers and credenzas over 100 years old that still function beautifully. Somehow, it all makes sense across eras.

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Italian furniture, especially mid-century, is some of the best in the world. Not because it’s collectible, but because it was actually built to be used and lived with. The proportions are right, the materials age well, and nothing feels overly precious.

At a place like this, you don’t buy what you came looking for. You return time and time again, and let pieces find you. You choose carefully what you welcome home, then you live with it.

Over time, those pieces don’t just fill a room, they change the history it holds.

Words and Photo by Carissa Tozzi.

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In the early days of spring, I find it unbearable to be shut up inside, sweating over a hot stove. The meal prepping and elaborate, time-intensive recipes that lend purpose to the quiet winter months lose their appeal abruptly and entirely; instead, I crave quick, flavorful dishes that come together with minimal fuss and can be eaten on the go. Hence, my obsession with pasta fredda. Endlessly adaptable, it’s a perfect weekday dish that requires very little prep, refrigerates beautifully, and feels substantial yet refreshing.

There are a few elements I tend to gravitate toward: something salty, like feta or capers; lemon or vinegar for punchy acidity; herbs like dill, parsley, or basil for brightness; and seasonal vegetables like zucchini, asparagus, or peas. The pasta shape depends entirely on the recipe and the contents of my pantry—short, frilly noodles like fusilli or radiatore are excellent for catching flavorful bits and staying toothsome, and penne is a classic.

Try Our Fav Pasta Fredda Shapes

While slick, lemony sauces occasionally call for longer noodles, like spaghetti or bucatini, long shapes don’t often find their way into a pasta fredda. So, I was skeptical the first time I made Alison Roman’s revelatory Pasta with Zucchini, Feta, and Fried Lemon—wouldn’t this dish be better warm? In truth, it’s exceptionally hard not to eat it straight from the pan. But trust me when I say that this particular pasta, like revenge, is best served cold. (The origin of that icy adage itself refers to the profound pleasures of delayed gratification, which this springtime pasta delivers in spades.) The longer the jammy, caramelized shallots and lemon slices sit with the zucchini and sizzled capers, the more complex the dish becomes. It can easily be prepped a few hours or a day in advance, and when you’re ready to dig in, it gets anointed with a drizzle of olive oil, creamy hunks of feta, salty toasted walnuts, and a liberal mix of parsley, dill, and fresh oregano. By the time you sit down to eat, you’ll have forgotten all about the 20 minutes you spent over the stove—the thing about a good pasta salad is that it seems to come together all on its own.

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But this isn’t pasta salad, you might think, noting the absence of the usual suspects (mayo, for one). Who gets to define what a salad is, anyway? While purists might have a few choice words for what constitutes a proper pasta, I’d venture that a pasta salad can be whatever you want it to be—take Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Cold Noodle Salad with Spicy Peanut Sauce, for example. A slaw of fresh, crunchy vegetables gets tossed along with chilled soba noodles in a spicy, citrusy peanut sauce, then studded with salted peanuts and cilantro leaves. It’s umami-rich and most importantly, requires no cooking at all; the only time you’ll spend at the stove is to boil water for the noodles.

While I’ve become near-evangelical in my affection for cold pasta, proselytizing its perks to anyone who will listen (great leftovers! a perfect vessel for your farmer’s market haul!)—the mere mention of pasta salad often elicits sneers or shudders of contempt from the uninitiated. The distrust runs deep; In 1984, the New York Times ran an article about Italian chefs who felt that “crimes [were] being committed in the name of pasta: fusilli with barely cooked vegetables in thick mayonnaise, tortellini in a cold pesto vinaigrette, takeout pasta to be warmed up at home.” (Leftover-shaming? In this economy? I won’t stand for it.) Marcella Hazan, the godmother of traditional Italian cooking in America, even issued a formal apology for introducing pasta salad to the masses. ‘’I used one pasta salad recipe in my second book,’‘ she told the Times, “Only one, and now I’m very sorry I did it. You can go all over Italy and you don’t find pasta salad.”

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And while I hate to disagree with Signora Hazan, today, pasta fredda has become a staple of spring and summer lunches across Italy. At the very least, antipasti abound, and can occasionally include tangy, vinegar-dressed pasta among the mix, as in Melissa Clark’s fan-favorite pasta salad. The word antipasto, which translates to “before the meal,” refers to Italian starters like cured meats, cheeses, and preserved vegetables such as olives or artichokes, all of which appear in Clark’s classic recipe. Traditionally, antipasto is served separately from the primo (pasta course), followed by a secondo (meat or fish course) and, finally, dolce (you know this one).

While lengthy meals of that sort may define a proper Italian meal, my lunch breaks don’t typically allow for quite so many courses, which is how pasta fredda and I got acquainted in the first place. What happens when you collapse the antipasto into the primo? With the right ingredients (no mayo required), you get something else entirely: a dish that’s equal parts nourishing and refreshing that even Hazan would have appreciated. Call it anti-pasta. Call it pasta fredda. Or, call it a pasta salad, if you must.

Words and photo by Sophie Dodd (@sickofsuburbia)

For my husband, who has spent every summer here since childhood, pasta carries the memory of family. He remembers sitting at his grandmother’s table when he was seven, watching her rise early on Sundays to roll out fresh dough for spinach and ricotta tordelli. She served them with meat ragù, the centerpiece of long family lunches that defined the rhythm of those summers. That sense of ritual—of food tying family together—has not changed, even if the cooks have.

Certain dishes signal the season as surely as the landscape does. Pappardelle al cinghiale, wide ribbons tangled with slow-cooked wild boar ragù, tastes different depending on what the animal has eaten. In summer, when the boar forage on cherries and plums, the meat is sweet and sharp. In autumn, after chestnut season, the ragù deepens into something nutty and earthy. Tagliatelle ai funghi porcini marks another turning point of the year, when mushroom hunters return from the forest with baskets of porcini, their earthiness carrying the flavor of the woods straight to the plate.

One dish we always have is testaroli, the signature pasta of Pontremoli. Considered to be Italy’s earliest recorded pasta, it is baked on a cast-iron griddle, cut into triangles, and dressed simply with basil pesto, olive oil, and cheese. Each bite feels like history. We’ve had it countless times at Osteria della Bietola, Osteria da Bussé 1930, and at Pizzeria San Giorgio, our family’s local spot. These restaurants are woven into our summers; returning to them feels as much a part of tradition as the dishes themselves.

Along the coast, our holidays are shaped by seafood pastas that taste of the sea air. At a simple restaurant on a small family beach, we eat bowls of spaghetti allo scoglio, tossed with clams, mussels, prawns, and squid in a garlicky white wine sauce. The food is unadorned, but each bite feels richer for being eaten just steps from the water. Even the most straightforward tomato sauce or pesto, when eaten seaside, seems infused with salt air, as if the setting itself seasons the dish.

Tuscan food is impossible to perfectly recreate outside of Tuscany because it springs directly from the land and sea around it. What makes these dishes unforgettable is not only their simplicity but the way they are inseparable from their place of origin. Pasta here remains timeless because it honors what it has always been—the pasta itself the main event, the sauce only there to accompany, never to overwhelm. Tordelli filled with spinach and served with ragù, pappardelle with rabbit, testaroli with pesto, spaghetti kissed by the sea—these are the flavors that root us here. For us, Pontremoli is more than where our family comes from; it’s where every plate of pasta reminds us we are home.

Words and photo by Carissa Tozzi (@carissatozzi)

The word aglio imprinted itself on my tastebuds soon after I started learning Italian. I’d stocked garlic in my pantry for years without giving it a second thought; now I was turning over a bulb in my hands, stuttering over the pronunciation of gli. It unlocked a childlike joy, this renewed attention to the small staples of my daily life.

I began by taking hour-long lessons each week, stumbling through the basics of conversation. Mi chiama Sophia, I said, hoping that shifting the e to an a would help me slip into a new persona.

Chiacchierare became my favorite word—to chit-chat. I’d sound it out slowly, key-AH-keh-rar-ray, savoring the different syllables. The briefest exchanges—on the metro, in line for grocery checkout—all at once felt impossibly ripe with meaning.

After a few months, I was still far from being able to chiacchierare. I parsed my way through conversations with my teacher, Valentina. She was petite, with inky black bangs, a nose ring, and a broad Roman accent. Ciao Sophie, she’d say, and I’d say it back like Chow. Each week, she’d prepare a sampling of new phrases for me: va bene, che bello, dov'è si trova, non capisco, posso avere, a verbal array of antipasti. I could speak only in bite-sized fragments, mashing my words together like baby food.

Valentina taught me the word for development, sviluppo, which I repeated to myself throughout the day to mark my palate’s progress.

I wasn’t allowed to use English during our lessons, so I couldn’t explain to her how delighted I was for this excuse to be grappling for words. She asked me what my goals were, why I wanted to learn Italian. I used Google translate to tell her that I loved how learning a language allowed for new ways of thinking, how my particular brand of hedonism seemed more palatable as la dolce vita. If I’d had the vocabulary, I’d have told her how words had lost their flavor in English.

Chiacchierare slipped around my mouth, conjuring wooden tables laden with glossy bowls of olive oil and salty shavings of pecorino, hands gesticulating animatedly over a wine-stained table cloth while homemade tomato sauce simmered on the stove. Everyone knows that food tastes better in Italy, but with each lesson, I learned that conversation does, too. Translation, it turns out, begins with the tastebuds.

Words and photo by Sophie Dodd (@sickofsuburbia)

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It doesn’t have to be this way, though. There’s a solution out there—and it’s not intermittent street hot dogs to soak up the booze: It's the aperitivo snack. The absolutely complementary bites offered with a beverage of any kind in Italy—and across Europe more broadly (though under different names in different regions). We're not talking about lobsters claws or cobb salad—we're talking about olives and potato chips, perhaps crackers, nuts, dried beans. Unprecious salted bites meant to complement your drinking experience, line your stomach, round out your palate.

The origins of the aperitivo snack date back to Ancient Rome, when it was common to enjoy “gustatio” — a pre-dinner course of light appetizers (often intended to ignite the appetite), frequently served with sweet wine, consumed before one banquet or another. Whether or not you plan to attend a banquet, there’s something near-holy about the humble potato chip enjoyed in the afternoon with an Aperol spritz.

Earlier this year, while in not-so-ancient Rome on a writing assignment, my boyfriend and I marveled at the generosity of such aperativo snacks—the cubes of local cheese and small toasts lovingly paired with house olives or rounds of cured sausage that arrived sans-solicitation like a gift or a surprise each time we sat for a drink. Even the simple crackers or nut blends were seasoned carefully, the potato chips optimally salted. While exhausted, having trekked many miles through museums, markets, and old cobble-stoned streets, there are few things more sating than the holy union of a negroni and a potato chip.

In France, amongst agricultural laborers, there’s a tradition called "casse-croûte"—think of it like a morning aperitivo hour. Having spent many weeks on end working on French vineyards, whereby your days of grape-gathering begin somewhere around 5am, casse-croute is like a petite North star: A much-needed breezy 11:00am snack—likely bread, paté, a little cheese—consumed in the vines with a glass of wine. No one over-indulges, or imbibes in excess. Instead, the micro-meal is a dose of energy administered when you need it most—not in lieu of lunch, but in preparation for it.

Much to my absolute chagrin, however, this sort of phenomenon has been eschewed entirely by the United States. Sure, at the Upper East Side’s Bemelman’s, patrons are awarded a trio of “free” snacks (crackers, chips, nuts)...though it’s worth mentioning that the martinis they accompany are nearly $30-a-pop. Potato chips and popcorn come with a decided surcharge even at the diviest of bars—nevermind the price on anchovies or wedges of cheese. And forget cured meat—that’ll set you back the price of an entree.

All of which is to say, it’s time for an aperitivo snack rallying cry. We deserve a few complementary solids with our requisite liquids. And frankly, they need not be special. Fine dining is not the point—it’s about the generous and humble olive, a few mixed nuts. Finger food. Pickles. And when did snacking become a lost art?

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In Pontremoli, that place has always been Caffè e Antica Pasticceria degli Svizzeri. The sign outside hasn’t changed since 1925, and neither has much else—which is exactly why we love it. We go for the brioches, almond cake, pralines, and nougat with local honey, but the spongata and amor are the real signatures: festive pastries that belong to Pontremoli alone. Sitting outside beneath the bell tower, with those flavors on the table, is how our summer mornings begin.

Tuscan cafés feel different from anywhere else in the world. The espresso is unmatched and the pastries are decadent—almost overwhelming if you’re not accustomed to it. When I first started going, I missed the idea of something savory, but here breakfast means sugar, and lots of it. And then something shifts—you start falling in love with the sweetness, until you can’t imagine beginning the day any other way.

That sweetness takes many forms: bomboloni, soft fried doughnuts rolled in sugar and filled with cream or jam; cantucci, golden almond biscuits with their delicate crunch; budino di riso, a shortcrust tartlet with lemon-scented rice pudding; or a rustic crostata with its lattice top spread with fruit preserves. And then, of course, the cornetto—Italy’s softer, sweeter cousin to the croissant, sometimes plain, more often ripieno with Nutella, pistachio cream, or jam, and always meant to be dipped into your cappuccino.

My family loves how effortlessly luxurious it feels. For about three euros you can sit down to a perfect espresso and a cornetto still warm from the oven. It’s indulgence disguised as routine, everyday glamour that belongs to everyone. That’s the beauty of Tuscan cafés: luxury made simple.

Which is why, this summer, we left Pontremoli early one morning to try something new. Less than forty minutes away, Viareggio feels worlds apart—famous for its Carnival, its Belle Époque promenade, and a new energy that makes it buzz again. At its heart is Caffè il Principino, the café we’d always meant to try. It didn’t disappoint: pistachio cream brioches we are still dreaming about, flawless espresso, the sea glittering just beyond our table. Polished but unpretentious, it turned breakfast into an occasion.

For us, Viareggio was a discovery that felt instantly like tradition. From now on, our summers will begin not only with our familiar mornings in Pontremoli but also with a new ritual by the sea. And just like the sweetness I once thought was too much, it’s impossible to imagine our Tuscan mornings any other way.

Words and photo by Carissa Tozzi (@carissatozzi)

It’s May, the start of green work season, so I’m learning how to prepare for the harvest—hoeing weeds, pruning vines, and tying up shoots. These words are as foreign to me as Italian, which is precisely why I’ve come to Umbria. I’ve been here for nearly a month already, staying with Ev and his wife, Claudia, in the tiny town of Montemolino, where they own a winery called Terramante. In exchange for room and board, I spend each morning working in their organic vineyard, which stretches out alongside the Tiber River.

The bell’s echo, woozy and metallic, is my signal to head inside to help Claudia prepare a pasta for the rag-tag bunch of friends, neighbors, and volunteers helping in the vines. We all spend the morning looking forward to whatever spread she’s set out for us; I don’t yet know much about wine, but I’m learning that a hearty serving of pasta is the only true antidote to hours of repetitive, appetite-inducing physical labor.

Inside the kitchen, Claudia is singing in Italian. Barefoot, she pads around the cool tiled floor while gathering up bowls and utensils, her grey-streaked hair piled atop her head. Ciao Sophie, come stai? She asks me as I walk into the room, a blue-and-yellow ode to her Sicilian heritage. A lemon-colored mosaic covers the back wall, with copper pots hooked above. She reaches for one, fills it with salted water and sets it on the stove to boil.

Tutto bene, I smile. Come posso aiutarti? How can I help?

She rattles off a list of ingredients she needs: pomodori, aglio, melanzana, cipolla, parmigiana. I start rummaging around the antique wooden hutch in search of what I think she asked for—canned tomatoes and a few knobs of garlic, for starters. This is the moment of the day I look forward to most: bustling around her kitchen together, palming different items and asking her to name them for me.

She hands me a chopping board and I start cubing up the eggplant and onions she’s set down in front of me. The meals we make here are simple, quick, and delicious, with vegetables plucked straight from her garden, or with eggs laid by the chickens out back.

Cosa facciamo? I ask her as she hands me a baking dish slicked with golden olive oil, gesturing for me to put the eggplant inside. Pasta all norma, she says. I beam at her in response; she knows it’s my favorite dish to eat after a long morning in the vines, a rustic cure-all for the type of hunger that can only come from pushing your body to its physical limits.

I’m not used to being this ravenous; at home in New York, I subsist mostly on snacks throughout the day, until it’s time for dinner. I’m relatively sedentary—I usually spend my days writing hunched over my laptop, not hinged over low-lying vines. Here, this humble dish is the one thing that has gotten me through the most exhausting and exhilarating days, and it’s one that I’ll be making for the rest of my life.

Inspired by Claudia’s version, this recipe calls for eggplant baked to custard-like perfection, warmed in a fragrant homemade tomato sauce, then topped with shards of fresh basil and whatever sharp, salty cheese you have in the fridge. Best served with a glass of Sangiovese—ovviamente, I’d recommend Terramante.

Pasta Alla Norma:

Time: 30 min.

Servings: 4-6

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup olive oil

• 1 small yellow onion, finely chopped

• 2 garlic cloves, finely minced

• ½ cup torn basil leaves, plus a few leaves for garnish

• 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes

• 3 or 4 small eggplants, cubed

• ½ cup grated ricotta salata, or parmesan

• ½ tsp sea salt

• ¼ tsp ground black pepper

• 1 pound penne

Instructions:

1. Cut eggplant into 1-inch cubes. Combine with olive oil, salt, and pepper in a baking dish, then bake at 400-degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes, tossing occasionally.

2. Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a sauce pot over medium-high heat. Cook onion until soft and golden, 8-10 minutes. Stir frequently.

3. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 3 minutes.

4. Add tomatoes, then simmer for 20 minutes. Season to taste.

5. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.

6. Cook the pasta until al dente. While it's cooking, remove the cooked eggplant from the oven and combine with the tomato sauce.

7. Drain the pasta, reserving a cup of cooking water to add to the sauce. Toss the pasta to combine with the sauce.

8. Top with fresh basil leaves and shaved ricotta salata or parmesan, and freshly-cracked black pepper.

Words and photo by Sophie Dodd (@sickofsuburbia)