The Complete Tuscan Table
Beyond our cooking classes: your culinary journey
Our two cooking sessions are the heart of your culinary experience, but your education in Tuscan food culture continues at every meal. We’ve spent years cultivating relationships with the restaurants, producers, and artisans who represent the best of our region—and over five days, you’ll taste why this coast has captivated food lovers for generations.
Your Dining Experiences:
The Coastal Tradition Lunch at our favorite seafood restaurant, set directly on the beach at Baratti. Here you’ll understand why coastal Tuscany’s cuisine differs from Florence’s—the Mediterranean influences everything, from the catch that morning to the way the chef thinks about simplicity.
The Wine Country Table Dinner at an elegant estate along the Bolgheri Wine Road, where Tuscan cuisine meets the sophistication of Super Tuscan wines. This is where local ingredients receive refined treatment, and you’ll see how modern Tuscan chefs honor tradition while creating something new.
The Village Heart Dinner at our favorite local wine shop—yes, it’s also a restaurant, and yes, it’s as authentic and cozy as that sounds. This is where locals eat, where the wine list features small producers we know personally, and where you’ll feel like you’ve discovered a secret.
The Grand Finale Your farewell dinner takes place at a fine dining restaurant owned by the family behind Sassicaia, one of the wines that put Bolgheri on the world map. Impeccable service, exceptional wine pairings, and cuisine that demonstrates why Tuscan cooking has influenced the world.
Note: The seafood lunch is the one meal on your own (though we’re delighted to join you at our expense)—giving you freedom to linger over the view, order exactly what calls to you, and absorb the pace of coastal Italian life.
Meeting the Local Tuscan Culinary Masters
Understanding terroir through the people who create it
Walking Food Tour of Castagneto Carducci I’ll take you through the village where we do our daily shopping, introducing you to the artisans and shopkeepers who’ve become friends. You’ll taste regional specialties, learn the stories behind local products, and understand how a small Tuscan village sustains its food traditions.
Organic Cheese Farm Experience At a family-run farm in the countryside, you’ll watch Pecorino cheese being made from morning milk, learn about traditional aging processes, and taste the difference that organic, pasture-based farming makes. Lunch at the farm follows—simple, honest food surrounded by the landscape that produced it.
Our Organic Philosophy Every producer we work with—from wine to cheese to olive oil—shares our commitment to organic practices and environmental respect. This isn’t a marketing position; it’s how people here have farmed for centuries, and how they’re choosing to continue.
Two Hands-On Cooking Classes in Chicca’s 18th-Century Farmhouse
Carefully curated meals that reveal the soul of coastal Tuscan cuisine
Born into a big Neapolitan family, I spent my childhood watching Nanny Lina transform simple ingredients into daily magic. For 54 years, she cooked for our family—never measuring, always tasting, passing down recipes that existed only in her hands and her heart.
When I restored our 18th-century farmhouse here in Castagneto, I designed the kitchen myself—architect’s precision meeting a cook’s intuition. The Carrara marble countertops, the light from windows overlooking our olive grove, the herbs growing just outside the door. This is where I’ve taught for over 20 years, and where you’ll learn that Italian cooking isn’t really about recipes. It’s about connection.
(IMAGES … DELETE TEXT AFTERWARDS) Exceptional experience of our Tuscan garden and farm house:
- Personal photos: young Chicca with Nanny Lina, the farmhouse restoration, the finished kitchen
- Olive trees on the property (your cooking oil comes from these)
- The marble countertops where generations of pasta have been rolled
- Garden herbs you’ll pick together
Your cooking classes in the Casa Toscana kitchen
Two mornings in Chicca’s kitchen
You’ll have two full hands-on cooking sessions at my farmhouse table, working side by side as I teach you the way Nanny Lina taught me—by feel, by taste, by the subtle changes in dough as you work it.
What We’ll Cook Together:
- Fresh pasta from scratch (you’ll learn the technique that lets you make any shape)
- Traditional Tuscan dishes using seasonal ingredients from our local producers
- Tiramisù the way Italian grandmothers make it (no recipe card needed once you understand it)
- Regional specialties that change with what’s best at market that morning
These aren’t demonstration classes where you watch. Your hands will be in the dough. You’ll taste as you go. You’ll learn to trust your senses the way Italian home cooks have for centuries.
And then we’ll sit together at my family’s table and eat what we’ve created, with wine from our vineyard friends, olive oil from our trees, and the kind of conversation that only happens when people cook and eat together.
Experience & Recipes You’ll Take Home
You won’t leave with just recipe cards (though you’ll have those too). You’ll leave with knowledge—the kind that lets you adapt, improvise, and truly cook rather than just follow instructions.
What You’ll Really Learn:
- How to know when pasta dough is right (it’s not about measurements)
- Why Italian cooking starts with excellent ingredients simply prepared
- The seasonal thinking that guides menu planning
- How to taste and adjust as you cook
- The confidence to trust your hands, your palate, your instincts
I provide recipe cards for everything we make together, and I’m always available afterward when you’re back home attempting your first solo pasta. Many of my former students still send photos and questions years later—that connection doesn’t end when you leave.
The Kitchen Where It Happens
My farmhouse kitchen is where architecture and cooking philosophy merge. I designed it myself during the restoration, creating a space that honors the building’s 18th-century bones while functioning perfectly for teaching.
The Carrara marble countertops aren’t just beautiful—they’re the ideal surface for pasta-making, staying cool even on warm Tuscan mornings. The windows overlook our olive grove, which produces the oil we’ll cook with. The herbs we need are steps away in the garden.
This isn’t a commercial cooking school. It’s my home, where I cook for my family every day, where the tools have been chosen over years of use, where everything has a story. When you learn here, you’re learning in the reality of Italian home cooking, not a simulation of it.
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