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 Heat and Cipe Pineles Leave Me Alone with the Recipes . These books encourage us to see 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