Ciao, I’m Barbara Rocci! I create immersive experiences in Le Marche. I’m passionate about Italy, its culture, its history, its food and its language. I help you create authentic escapes, learn Italian and get a taste of the magic of Italian culture.
If learning to speak Italian spontaneously sounds like something you’d like to do, grab my free course here. Not into the language, but would love to discover my region? Here’s my exclusive guide: Discover Le Marche Region Unplugged
Today, I’m delighted to share this conversation with Wendy Holloway, the voice behind Flavor of Italy.
Wendy came to Italian food the way the best things come to us: sideways, through life. Long before she ever imagined herself living in Rome, she was a child with her own vegetable garden, baking yeast breads at ten years old while her parents were out for the evening. The passion was always there. Italy gave it a home.
Her path to Rome wasn’t a romantic escape but a deliberate choice: as a vice president at PNC Bank, she proposed opening an office there so she could be where her future husband was. Once she arrived, her Italian mother-in-law, her neighbours, the markets… they all became her teachers. She learned recipes, and beyond that, a whole philosophy of eating: seasonal, local, rooted in place.
Today, with nearly 300 podcast episodes behind her, Wendy has become one of the most curious and wide-ranging voices on Italian food culture.
She doesn’t limit herself to the obvious. She goes looking for the bells behind the bells: the history of macaroni and cheese, the blue crabs arriving in ballast waters and upending an entire coastal ecosystem, the women of Puglia gathering burnt scraps from harvested fields and turning them into pasta out of sheer necessity.
In this conversation, Wendy and I wander together through fava beans and baccalà, through the hidden food treasures of Le Marche, through what it means to be an insider-outsider in a food culture that is constantly changing, even as it insists it never does.
Because if there is one thing Italian food teaches us, it is this: every dish carries a story. And the story is always longer than the recipe.
This conversation is one of a series of interviews that now live on Time to Be Italian, my podcast dedicated to the people, stories, and flavours that make Italy impossible to forget. You can listen on Substack or on your favorite platform. If you enjoyed it, I'd love to know!
