Katie Parla

When I began spending half the week on Murano in August 2021, I could barely understand what anyone said. I spoke Italian fluently, but everyone else spoke Venetian, including local inflections and vocabulary I eventually came to comprehend. My connection to the island began through my relationship with a man who is now my ex. We joined his apartment with the one his mother owned, creating a massive sequence of lofted rooms inside a former factory that had produced refractory materials for...

Four grown men were standing around my kitchen island groaning in unison, which is generally not what you want to hear when someone unpacks your new Carrara marble countertop. They had just carried the 600-pound slab into Parla Cucina, my forthcoming cooking school in Rome. Now, as the packaging came off, we could all see the massive crack near the cutout for the cooking surface, running across the marble’s 2.7-meter edge. There were loose pieces, too. “Che peccato,” one said. The others took...

October is high season in Rome, and Parla Tours is running at full speed. I love leading food tours, but after a day of walking, talking, tasting, and keeping everyone fed, I’m often too tired to go out to eat, let alone cook. At this time of year, I lean on recipes that ask little of me up front: a few minutes of hands-on prep, then a slow simmer while I get on with the rest of my life. They’re especially useful when they’re easy to double or triple, so I can put dinner on the table one...

I have never met anyone more obsessed with vinegar than my friend Andrea Bezzecchi. This is saying something because I spend a lot of time with people who have built their lives around one ingredient, one process, or one extremely specific product. Andrea discusses acetic acid bacteria with the same intensity most people reserve for politics or professional soccer. Spend enough time with him, and you will never throw the word “balsamic” around so casually again. Andrea runs Acetaia San...

People often ask me where they can escape the crowds in Venice. They are usually hoping I will reveal an undiscovered neighborhood where laundry flaps above silent canals and no one has ever heard of TikTok. That place does not exist. What Venice offers instead is Cannaregio, a district where one of the city’s busiest pedestrian routes lies a few streets from residential courtyards, working boats, neighborhood bars, and some of the best food and drink in the lagoon. Cannaregio occupies...

Few dishes are as deeply woven into Roman food culture as amatriciana. Apparently born in the mountain village of Amatrice and embraced by Rome, it has become one of the city’s essential pastas: saucy, savory, and richly glossed with rendered guanciale. When late-summer tomatoes are in season, their freshness brings welcome brightness and added lightness to this pork fat-laced dish. The herbs further elevate the freshness. I’m also thrilled to see short tubular shapes such as bombolotti and...

Bruno Amadi does not make glass fruit in the decorative sense. His radicchio leaves, pea pods, and asparagus spears are not generic ornaments vaguely resembling something found in the produce aisle. They have weight, irregularity, transparency, and color. They look as though they ripened before being transformed into glass, which is more or less the point. Born on Burano in 1946, Amadi moved to Murano with his family when he was four. His father worked in a furnace, and Bruno began doing the...