It's springtime in Tuscany when my girlfriends and I arrive for our organic cooking course. In Italian, this time of year is called primavera (like the pasta sauce that's made with crisp Mediterranean vegetables).
Wild poppies and honeysuckle line the narrow roads and the vines on the sloping hillsides are bursting with new leaves.
It's hard to keep your eye on the road when there's a villa and a view to admire around every corner. The locals buzz around the bends and honk their horns at us, shaking their heads at the tourists who keep straying to the left and don't know where they're going.
After arriving in Florence, we whizz through the town of Certaldo (pronounced Cher-taldo). It's typically Italian - narrow, pastel-hued buildings, shuttered windows and the old castle parapets up on the hill. Charming, and relatively undiscovered by tourists. Over a bridge and we're out in the countryside.
There's more to marvel at when we get to our villa, a pale gold beauty from the eighteenth century with stained glass windows, a marble staircase and a vista straight out of a souvenir postcard.
In a spacious but homey kitchen we get down to work. Through the open doors we can see the green hills and hear the birds singing. We meet the chef, Manuela, who can spin a round of pastry like a circus juggler. Our instructor,Tina, is a classic, husky-voiced brunette in the Sophia Loren mould. She was once a film editor for Francis Ford Coppola. These days she's a professor of Italian film studies in Florence, where she indulges her passion for the movies of Federico Fellini when she's not sharing her family's culinary secrets.
Is it the sweet life (La Dolce Vita)? Her smile says it all.
We start, naturally, with pasta. It's how Italian mamas introduce their babies to solids - with a splash of olive oil and cheese. As they grow, the children work in the kitchen with their mothers, turning the handle on the pasta machine or catching the sheets as they pass through the press. Italy's birth rate has dropped to among the lowest in Europe. It seems young Italians are opting out of parenthood because they earn too little to support a family. Perhaps, like everyone else, they want the good things in life and children come with too high a price tag. There's evidence for this in one of the cookery school's recipes. It's an old-fashioned dish of finely-chopped vegetables made to resemble meat, a rare luxury.
Making pasta takes ages, so it's a job best left to raving insomniacs or, for the working wife, the traditional family feast on a Sunday. Store-bought pasta is a week-day convenience that doesn't come close in texture or taste to fresh egg tagliatelle that's been made from scratch. In a return to the old ways, farmers in Italy have recently added to their wheat variety by growing the ancient type, spelt.
Tired but ridiculously proud of ourselves, the cooking group dines in the garden under the spreading branches of a chestnut tree.
We are in Chianti country, so we drink carafes of this famous red wine made from the San Giovese grape. Our sommelier, the Roman Cristina, says rigorous controls have improved the quality of Chianti wines over the years. Most Tuscan families with a little plot of land will plant vines for their own consumption. In fact, all over Italy, we see vegetable patches, backyard vineyards and olive groves.
The white wine in Tuscany has its origins in the charming, Medieval stone-towered town of San Gimignano, and is made from the Vernaccia grape. In keeping with the culture of no waste, Italians produce Vin Santo, a golden dessert wine, from grape skins. For a typical Tuscan end to a meal, try Cantucci (Tuscan biscotti with almonds) dipped in Vin Santo.
It's back to the kitchen the next day to make gnocchi from waxy, yellow potatoes. These are boiled, baked or steamed in their skins before being peeled, pushed through a potato ricer and combined with flour. Then they are popped into a pot of boiling water.
We feast on light, velvety gnocchi, tart little onions in balsamic vinegar reduction and spicy sundried tomatoes - not necessarily in that order. Shilpa and Riccardo, who run the Organic Tuscany Cookery School, try to give participants a stab at making a wide variety of simple Italian dishes, sourced from local biodynamic farms.
Like most Italian kitchens, our villa cucina is without a microwave oven, soda stream or food processor. Tina tells us Italians are suspicious of gadgets and immune to food fads. But their love of good food prepared with patience and passion has ensured Italian fare is copied, recognised and enjoyed worldwide.
They eat what's in season and cooking styles vary from region to region. For instance, southerners use more tomatoes than their Tuscan cousins. Tuscan food is considered quite salty (we're not complaining!) and is laden with the justifiably world-renowned local olive oil.
Like the wine, olive growing, harvesting and pressing is a home industry for most families. The trees have an odd-looking bald-patch in the middle. They are pruned that way to allow for easy access. Workers literally "comb" the branches by hand and the fruit - unpalatable in comparison to other olive varieties - lands on a "parachute". From there it is taken to a local press where there's usually a group of old men waiting around for the first pressing and arguing about yields and flavours.
In the past, families used to store their olive oil in large clay pots. Apart from being cumbersome (getting to the dregs in the bottom required some acrobatics), they are no longer considered hygienic. Nowadays, the locals plant roses, rhodedendrons and lemon trees in them.
Italy's centuries-old olive oil industry is under threat from Spain. There they prune the olive trees square and harvest the fruit with a machine, meaning Spanish olive oil can sell for an eighth of the price of Tuscan. Like most things Tuscan, tasting and buying olive oil is an art. Beware of an oil that leaves a greasy film on the lips and make sure it is sourced, pressed and bottled in one place.
Like the cartoon Gaul Asterix from Italy's other neighbour, France, Tuscan farmers hunt wild boar for the pot. Parts of these ferocious-looking creatures find their way into any number of Italian meat delicacies.
The locals will also shoot pheasants, with their beautiful emerald plumage, and other birds. By now anyone who doesn't get their culinary education from Italian-themed family restaurants will know that pasta is not the main course in Italy, but a primi or secondi piatti (plate) which can be preceded by crostini (bruschette with a topping of mushroom or chicken liver paté or roasted peppers and goats' cheese).
Another favourite antipasto is a platter of cold meats like mortadella, prosciutto or salame. Anyone for boar?
For mains, Tuscans tuck into dishes like Pollo alla Cacciatora (chicken slow cooked in a herb, olive and vegetable sauce) or roast pork in a rich tomato gravy. Salad is often plain, crunchy lettuce tossed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, while vegetables can be in the form of a soufflé flan (Sformati) or roasted with the ubiquitous garlic cloves. Less popular in other parts is Tuscan bread, which is coarse textured and traditionally unsalted.
To produce masterpieces like risotto, Polpettone (Tuscan meatloaf) or turkey breast stuffed with grapes and cooked in milk (Tacchino al Latte), the self-respecting Italian cook will grow and use herbs and vegetables like fennel, basil and sage - as well as visit the market very early in the morning for the freshest produce. Instead of high-powered appliances, she (or he) will make use of a mezzeluna (a half-moon shaped cutting utensil for herbs, vegetables and other foodstuffs), a passatutto (which mashes and peels tomatoes and beans), a ricer, and elbow grease.
Each day she will have a fresh vegetable stock bubbling on the stove, the basis of which is garlic, olive oil, carrots, celery and onions. This is added to a Ragu di Carne (meat), pomodoro (tomato) or vegetable pasta sauce and is used in a variety of other dishes.
Dessert might be a moist apple cake, a custard pie spiked with roasted pine nuts and infused with vanilla or a velvety tiramisu. But Vin Santo and Cantucci beats them all.
Silky-smooth Pecorino (sheep's cheese) and dark green, slightly bitter chestnut honey are staples on the Tuscan breakfast table. Instant coffee is fairly taboo - instead you'll have aromatic ground coffee which might originate in South America as part of Italy's fair trade agreement with other countries. This you will brew in a mocha machine, and you'll wonder why you ever drink coffee any other way.
The story goes that an Italianzia (aunt) was surprised to learn that a microwave oven could cook a whole chicken in six minutes.
"Why?" she asked, as any Italian food purist would.
Why indeed?
