I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
Press it with your thumb
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I like to think of myself as a chef. A good chef doesn’t start with the recipe. She starts with what’s on the counter. She picks it up. Smells it. Presses it with her thumb. A tomato in July and a tomato in November are not the same tomato, and pretending they are is how you ruin dinner. Italians have a phrase for this obsession: la materia prima. The raw material. Get that right and you barely need to do anything. Get it wrong and no sauce will save you. When a person sits in front of me, or a family, or a story, I do the same thing. I look before I do anything. Some people need slow heat. You don’t rush them. You let Italy work on them for weeks before they say a single sentence out loud. Some need the opposite. A hot pan. A village on day two. A market at 7 a.m. A conversation they weren’t ready for. Some families arrive bruised. I don't rush them. And some stories arrive wrapped in a family history. Those I handle like bread dough. With patience, and warm hands. A recipe is what you use when you don’t know the ingredients. I’d rather know the ingredients. That’s why no two Belonging Years look alike. Same Italy. Different ingredients on the counter. Tell me, which one does your story need? Un abbraccio, |
Fabiana Stringa
I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
Look closely at yin and yang. Black and white, curled around each other. Most people stop there. But there’s a detail that changes everything: a small white dot inside the black half. A small black dot inside the white. Each one carries a trace of the other. Always. I call what I do Italian Taoism. I was born in Genoa, on the same Ligurian coast as Portofino and Cinque Terre. Then I spent a decade across three continents. None of those places erased Genoa. Genoa didn’t erase them either. They...
The other day I was waiting at a red light in Turin. Impatient. Counting the seconds. And I remembered something I’d read about The Italian Job. Not the 2003 remake. The original, 1969. Michael Caine, three Mini Coopers, and a gold heist in the middle of Turin. The screenwriter, Troy Kennedy Martin, moved the story here for one reason. At the time, Turin had one of the most advanced computerized traffic systems in Europe. Traffic lights run by a computer. In 1969, that sounded like science...
Late 1980s. A young Italian at university, Francesco Cirillo, can’t focus. He sits down with his books, and every few minutes his mind wanders off. So he grabs a kitchen timer. Shaped like a tomato. Un pomodoro. He sets it and makes himself one promise: until it rings, I do only this. Twenty-five minutes of attention. A short break. Repeat. After four rounds, a longer break. The Pomodoro Technique. It works because it doesn’t ask for willpower. It asks for a small, honest container. Your...