SKETCH and COOK PUGLIA
A Sketching and Cooking Workshop in Southern Italy, with Simo Capecchi
3-9 May 2026
A group of sketching and food enthusiasts spent a week together exploring where food comes from in and around the Pugliese town of Ceglie Messapica. Simo Capecchi led the robust and comprehensive drawing instruction over five days. Tonino Tuma of La Cilona was our guide and chef extrodinaire through the world of local food as he invited us into his kitchen to learn his recipes and prepare them alongside him.
We visited the urban, medieval gardens of Ostuni with Bio Solequo Coop and tasted the ancient varieties of vegetables they are bringing back to life. Along with seeing a Roman-era underground olive press, we tasted different types of oils and drew in our sketchbooks the millenia-old trees that produced the olives at Masseria Brancati. Teresa, Gino, and Pasqualina taught us how to make orecchiette, focaccia, and frise in a wood fired oven. We toured Masseria Fragnite and saw the cows that produced the milk that later became the mozzarella we ate, made beautifully by Rocco (who had to do things a bit slower so we could draw him!). Felice introduced us to all the edible wild herbs we can eat and use medicinally, everywhere around us, right below our feet. We went to the Adriatic sea for a picnic, and then sketched....underwater! We wandered through the medieval alleys of the center of Ceglie Messapica. A full, beautiful, fun, week with a great group of sketchers, some who were brand new to drawing.
THE INVITATION
This spring you are invited to pair your passion for sketching with your love of good food as we draw and cook for 5 days in the Valle d’itria, this special area of Puglia I have chosen to call home for the last 13 years. Along with Simo Capecchi, an illustrator and one of the founders of Urban Sketchers, and Tonino Tuma, a local chef and our host, you will be introduced to the flavours and ingredients of Puglia in a hands-on, authentic way through people that love sharing their culinary culture with others.
This workshop is for all drawing levels. This is not a cooking only workshop, there are plenty of those to choose from! This workshop combines the two arts, illustration and cooking, as an approach for deeper understanding, appreciation , and respect for the history, place, and people of the area. Getting your hands dirty in the kitchen is up to you, but capturing it all through painting, drawing, collage, or whatever method you choose, is the real essence of the experience! Even if you are a beginner to drawing, you are welcome! What’s mandatory is the desire and interest to draw.
The workshop highlights the main culinary staples of Puglia. We will visit a masseria, a rural farmhouse complex, with millenia-old olive trees and a Roman era olive press, and taste different types of extra-virgin olive oil. We will explore the terraced, peri-urban gardens nestled below the white, medieval town of Ostuni where the caretakers are preserving ancient varieties of vegetables through organic means, as well as restoring the medieval system of irrigation. We’ll make bread and orecchiete with a nonna, and forage wild edible plants with a local expert and author on the subject. We will learn how mozzarella is made. And we’ll do it all by documenting the ingredients, processes, and recipes in our sketchbooks and sharing and eating together.
Inspiration for the workshop comes from some of our favorite illustrated cookbooks that combine culinary techniques with drawings of ingredients, woven together through personal experiences and local lore. At the top of this list is Honey From a Weed, Patience Gray’s memoir written and published in Puglia in 1986. She captured not only the local rhythms of rural Pugliese life in that time, but melded that together with straight forward recipes and personal stories, supported by simple, yet elegant illustrations. We also love drooling over the drawings in Wendy MacNaughton’s Salt Fat Acid Heatand Cipe Pineles Leave Me Alone with the Recipes . These books encourage us tosee food as something beyond just fuel to keep our bodies moving, but as something that deeply connects us to our geographical place on the planet, and to each other.
It is in this spirit that you are invited to draw, cook, and eat with us this spring!
Simo and I met in 2015 when I participated in my first sketching workshop in Ischia. Since then we have travelled and sketched together in many places including Chicago, Morocco, Sardinia, Greece, and of course Naples and Puglia. We ran our first workshop together in Ceglie Messapica in September 2019 called “Disegnare e Fare, a Hands'-on Sketching Workshop”, which combined our passions of making things and reportage of people making things, and doing both at the same time. I’m thrilled to be collaborating with her again. I hope you’ll join us!
-Amanda
ABOUT SIMO
Simo Capecchi studied Architecture in Venice and completed her PhD degree at the University of Naples (Italy) in Architectural Drawing but she prefers to draw and work as an illustrator. Based in Naples she specializes in illustrated maps, drawings, and sketched reportages. She has been an instructor in many international Urban Sketchers Symposiums around the world since their foundation and has organized several Urban Sketchers Workshops both in Italy and abroad. Since 2015 she is the back page columnist on the Italian travel magazine “DOVE” (Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera). Simo also collaborates with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, where she created a new illustrated map of the Pompeii archaeological excavations. She recently published "The olive trees of Capri. A story of heroic agriculture", Electa 2024. Instagram: @simo_capecchi Facebook: Simo Capecchi
ABOUT AMANDA
Amanda founded ARCHISTRATI in 2013 when she moved from the skyscrapers of Chicago, USA, to the humble stone structures of Puglia, southern Italy. In the Valle d’itria area of Puglia she facilitates drawing retreats, hands-on stone workshops, and one-day walks, experiences and presentations focused on vernacular architecture where participants are encouraged to explore and engage with the unique built environment in a deep and meaningful way. She started sketching more seriously after taking Simo’s Urban Sketching workshop in Ischia in 2015. She was a recepient of the Urban Sketchers Reportage Grant in 2023 and documented, in sketch, the effects of a disease killing the olive trees in Puglia. She keeps a foot in Chicago however, as Senior Architect with BTL Architects, Inc. and returns to the city every summer to restore historic facades of high rise buildings from suspended scaffolds, which satisfies the adventurer in her, and her persistent desire to be outside. She never leaves home without her sketchbook because, you just never know what you’ll find out there to draw and remember.