Flavor of Italy podcast

Discover the Amalfi Coast by Boat with Blue Star Positano

There's something magical about seeing the Amalfi Coast from the water. The colorful villages clinging to the cliffs, hidden coves, sparkling Mediterranean waters, and breathtaking coastline are even more spectacular when explored by boat.

This weekend I'm back in Positano, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to revisit my conversation with Elisabeth, who, together with her husband Pepe, owns and runs Blue Star Positano, a family-operated boat tour company right on Positano's beachfront.

In this episode, Elisabeth shares a little about life in Positano and the boat excursions they offer, from small-group cruises where you can meet fellow travelers to private, custom-designed adventures along the coast. They also organize full-day excursions to Capri, but Elisabeth's real passion is sharing the extraordinary beauty of the Amalfi Coast, the place she and her family call home.

Whether you're planning your first visit to Positano or returning to one of Italy's most enchanting destinations, this conversation offers a wonderful insider's perspective on exploring the coast by sea.

Discover Blue Star Positano on their website and follow them on Instagram and Facebook to start planning your own Amalfi Coast adventure.

On October 16, the world celebrates World Food Day, an annual initiative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This year, one of its newest Food Heroes isn't an individual farmer, chef, or food entrepreneur. It's an entire community: Pollica, a small municipality in the Cilento area of southern Italy, where the Mediterranean Diet isn't simply a way of eating. It's a way of life.

Pollica is a Mediterranean Diet UNESCO community, recognized for preserving the traditions and cultural practices that make the Mediterranean Diet so much more than a collection of healthy foods. Here, generations of fishermen, farmers, families, and local residents have maintained a close relationship with the land, the sea, and one another. Sustainable fishing, seasonal agriculture, shared meals, and the passing down of knowledge are woven into everyday life, and the community's FAO recognition is a celebration of the people who keep these traditions alive.

I spoke with Sara Roversi, founder of the Future Food Institute, who has been working closely with the community of Pollica.

When I talked about Italian cheese with food and travel writer Eleonora Baldwin on the Flavor of Italy podcast, one of the things that struck me was just how much there is to know about a food most of us take completely for granted. Eleonora is a longtime cheese lover who has turned that fascination into part of her professional life. She created and hosted several seasons of AB Cheese for the Gambero Rosso television channel and has incorporated cheese tastings and cheese and wine pairings into her food and travel work.

The Joy of Salsas Across the Globe: When most of us hear the word salsa, we probably picture something red, tomato-based and perhaps fairly spicy, sitting alongside a bowl of tortilla chips. But salsa is a much bigger world than that. It can be fresh or cooked, red or green, fiery or mild, made with tomatoes, fruit, herbs, roasted vegetables or even ingredients you would never expect. Once you start thinking about fresh homemade salsas as simply combinations of good ingredients brought together to add flavor to a dish, the possibilities become almost endless.

There are certain ingredients I simply can't imagine my kitchen in Italy without, and lemons are high on that list. Cooking with lemons is such a natural part of my everyday life in Italy that I hardly stop to think about how often I use them. So when I sat down in Rome with Joanna Palmer, author of La Limone Kitchen Cookbook, we had quite a lot to talk about. As the name suggests, Joanna's cookbook revolves around lemons, but our conversation quickly became about much more than recipes. We talked about family food traditions, learning to cook without rigid rules, choosing and storing lemons, the best way to zest them, and the small kitchen habits we inherit from the people around us. And, inevitably, we talked about cooking with lemons, because once you start paying attention to how often you reach for a lemon in the kitchen, you realize just how versatile this one ingredient can be.

If the first part of this story made you want to explore The Odyssey connections for yourself, you can follow them along a surprisingly compact stretch of the Lazio coast. Begin in Sperlonga, continue south to Gaeta and Formia, and, if you have time, head north to Monte Circeo. Some of these connections are archaeological, while others stem from ancient, longstanding local traditions, but together they explain why this beautiful coastline is known as the Riviera di Ulisse.

Here's where to stay in:

Sperlonga https://booking.stay22.com/flavorofitaly/NYu4bd2MDg

Gaeta https://booking.stay22.com/flavorofitaly/xl7GbToVSz

Formia https://booking.stay22.com/flavorofitaly/1Lj0JkPxNL

Monte Circeo https://booking.stay22.com/flavorofitaly/cvfVyrm06-

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Sperlonga and The Odyssey have been intertwined for nearly two thousand years, and now Sperlonga is having an unexpected new moment in the spotlight thanks to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. The connection couldn't be more appropriate. Long before Hollywood turned its attention to the epic adventures of Odysseus, a Roman emperor created an astonishing celebration of those same adventures in a vast seaside grotto here in Sperlonga.

If Sperlonga has already captured your attention and you'd like to visit, here's where you can stay.

For this episode's show notes and photos find them here.

What happens when filmmakers from around the world gather in an Italian city to tell stories about food? At the Bergamo Food Film Festival, the answer turns out to be about much more than beautiful dishes on a screen. Food becomes a way to talk about memory, place, health, agriculture, family, cultural identity and, perhaps most importantly, human connection.

What do you get when two 22-year-olds with almost no money decide that the canals of Southern California need gondolas? In the case of David F. Black and his friend Mike O'Toole, you get a leaky Pakistani fishing boat, an old lifeguard dory, plenty of people convinced the idea will never work, and eventually one of the most unusual Italian-inspired businesses in America. More than four decades later, gondolas are still gliding through the canals of Naples Island in Long Beach, California.

What happens when the doorbell rings and suddenly you have people to feed? Maybe your husband is bringing colleagues home, relatives appear unexpectedly, or friends are coming over and you'd really like the evening to feel special. You start wondering what you can possibly put on the table, which bottle of wine to open, whether you have the right glasses, and how you're going to pull everything together without spending hours in the kitchen.

This is exactly when Megan Recce wants you to call your food and wine big sister.

That's how Megan describes the role she hopes to play for anyone who has questions about food and wine entertaining. No question is too basic, and there's no requirement that you know the difference between Gamay and Sangiovese or own twelve different kinds of wine glasses. Her approach is practical, knowledgeable and, above all, reassuring: food and wine are supposed to bring people together, not make us anxious about whether we're doing everything correctly.

That philosophy was at the heart of my recent Flavor of Italy podcast conversation with Megan. We talked about everything from opening a bottle of wine and choosing the right glass to assembling a last-minute cheese board, making a simple pasta impressive, setting a beautiful table, choosing wine for a sweltering summer evening, and why you should actually say yes when a dinner guest asks, "What can I bring?"