And while other passions in your life may at some point begin to bank their fires, the shared happiness of good homemade food can last as long as we do.

And while other passions in your life may at some point begin to bank their fires, the shared happiness of good homemade food can last as long as we do.

I need to smell its smells, to hear its sounds, to see food in a pot that simmers, bubbles, sizzles. I enjoy the physical involvement of stirring, turning, poking, mashing, scraping.

In the Italian kitchen, ingredients are not treated as promising but untutored elements that need to be corrected through long and intricate manipulation and refined by the ultimate polish of a sauce.

[On cooking:] What you keep out is as significant as what you put in.

The Italian comes to his table with the same open heart with which a child falls into his mother's arms, with the same easy feeling of being in the right place.

Not everyone in Italy may know how to cook, but nearly everyone knows how to eat. Eating in Italy is one more manifestation of the Italian's age-old gift of making art out of life.