Lindsay Marie Morris

Inspired by her grandmother Palmira Giglia, acclaimed "Vaccaro" turtlenecks designer and owner of Settebello boutique in Boston, Giuliana Leila Raggiani launched her design career in 2013 after studying at Parsons School of Design and completing the knitwear program at Central Saint Martins in London. 

She started with an intimate collection of four chunky jacquard oversized sweaters made on her knitting machine. The collection evolved following Giglia's passing in 2014 when Giuliana chose to reproduce her grandmother's iconic turtleneck.

 

"Little did I know it would become the missing piece to the puzzle of giu giu," Giuliana says, reflecting on her own brand's launch. 

Called "NONNA," this homage to the woman who taught her about fabrics was also a gift to Giglia's original customers, who began contacting Giuliana to share their personal memories tied to the coveted collection.

 

Encouraged, Giuliana expanded the "NONNA" collection into different silhouettes, following her grandmother's knitting technique.

 

Today, "NONNA" sits at the heart of giu giu. Giuliana divides her time between France and Tokyo, where she opened GIU GIU House. This seasonal experience/community space serves as a gallery, shop, café, and portal to a beloved brand.  

Giuliana took time to discuss her background and how her grandmother inspired her. She revealed her design philosophy, reflected on memorable collections and experiences, and shared advice for other designers. 

 

 

What is your connection to Sicily?

My mother is from Sicily, and I am a first-generation Sicilian born in Boston, Massachusetts. A lot of my family still live in a small village called Aragona, in Agrigento. It's a beautiful historic region by the sea, and I'd love to find time to visit more frequently. 

 

Tell us about your grandmother Palmira Giglia, and how she inspired you.

My nonna, Palmira Giglia, was a true queen. She was always my favorite person to spend time with, and truly understood me to my core. She had hands of magic—everything she touched somehow became a work of art, whether it was a dress she was sewing, her garden, or a dessert she was making. She was fabulous, had impeccable taste, taught me about fabrics and cooking, and had an undying passion for the arts in all forms. 

There was something truly divine about her essence. She opened a boutique in Boston with my godfather, Gino, from the 1960s to the early 90s, called Settebello, after they emigrated from Italy. Together, they created a cult line of knitwear, specifically, the "Vaccaro" turtleneck, an iconic shrunken ribbed knit available in a rainbow palette of hues. 

 

giu giu "Nonna" turtleneck in "Cobweb"

How do you blend your heritage into your designs?

It is naturally embedded in every stitch of the knitting, as my designs are rooted in my nonna's work and passed down to me.  I feel it's my duty to honor the lineage of something that served so many people with positive memories. It is an ancestral timeline and my practice in the "art of preservation." 

 

How does the giu giu design philosophy and aesthetic reflect your personal experiences and influences?

The philosophy of Guu Giu is to feel comfortable in your skin, like you're wearing nothing and everything at the same time, because it feels so good on your physical body. 

I think back to my personal experiences where I felt best in my clothing and try to replicate that feeling through my designs. I believe your clothing should work with your body and not against it. Garments that excite the senses more than just visually. Touch. Mixing textures through fiber and stitch. An invitation to explore and play—to roll, tie, twist, reverse, etc. To engage your inner child.

 

One of the main reasons I love knitwear comes from my personal experience as a dancer.  I always loved that dance-wear allowed movement and had this casual and carefree ability to adjust as needed.  It's an inspiration that stays constant in my work.

 

 

giu giu "Nonna" turtleneck in "Baleine"

 

Tell us about some memorable collaborations.

Ah, it's tough to choose, as each collection has been so special and serves as a little time capsule for me. I'd have to say, in 2020, during the first wave of COVID, my factory shut down for months. I didn't have any physical samples to shoot, so I got together with some friends in L.A., and we created a very extra-terrestrial virtual reality film for giu giu using a green screen. It was such a different perspective and way of showing the giu giu world and a fun way to solve a seemingly huge setback. 

 

giu giu "Nonna" blazer and button-down in "Mud"

What has been the most rewarding part of your journey?

After 11 years of growing this baby, I think finally being able to see the fruits of my labor through the community I've built has been the most rewarding. Hearing directly from customers and the giu giu family about how this clothing has touched, healed, and created memories of love for others brings me so much joy. It's the small part I can do in the grand spectrum of helping change the world in an effort to make it a more beautiful and harmonious place. 

 

giu giu "Nonna" turtleneck in "Kaki"

What advice would you give to aspiring fashion designers?

Listen to your intuition. The right path does not always look the same for everyone. It may not make sense on paper or when you do the math. People may call you crazy.  But you always feel the answer in your gut. Sometimes, you have to move against the grain of what's "normal" or what has worked for others. Yet, in the end, I promise you will never regret it. 

 

 
"Sometimes, you have to move against the grain of what's 'normal'..."

 

 

 

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Margie Raimondo arrives at our Zoom interview seated before a hillside of brightly colored houses. It's a virtual background, a photo of Prizzi, home to her father's Sicilian family. Combined with her mother's Neapolitan roots, Margie's Italian heritage has served as an important backdrop to her pursuits since she left a successful career in the tech industry.

 

"Ultimately, at some point, I decided, 'OK, I've done all this—check, check, check the boxes. Now I'm going to do something for me,'" Margie remembers. "And I thought the most natural thing for me to do with all of my great accolades and degrees was to be a politician or a professor."

She looked into a Ph.D. program in public policy and got so far as to request sponsorship when it hit her: She didn't want that life. 

She had recently gone through a divorce and needed to heal. It was time to take care of herself and reflect on what she actually needed. "And there was this little nudge that kept saying, 'Go back to your roots,'" she says.

She remembered being six years old and running around her family's garden, their communal living, and gathering around the table to share good food.

 

"That just brought joy to my heart," says Margie, "So I packed up all my stuff and went to Italy."

She started her journey in Sicily, and from there, she rolled up her sleeves and got her hands dirty, planting the seeds for what would become Urbana Farmstead, a one-acre urban farm in Little Rock, Arkansas. She not only grows food but also hosts garden-based cooking and preservation classes and monthly high teas with her signature farm-grown blends.

 

With cookbooks to complement the offerings, it's clear this former VP of marketing has fashioned her own lifestyle brand. She shared more about her inspiration (and how her family played a part), sustainable farming practices, community outreach, challenges, and rewards.

 

 

Share your background and how that influenced you.

My father's family left Sicily and first went to Pueblo, Colorado. Eventually, they made their way to California, where my father was born. We were in the southeastern part of Los Angeles. We grew up completely poor, as you can imagine. But what happened was that my grandparents and all of the other Italians had their traditional way of living, which is what they came with. They came with the knowledge of growing your own food and preserving your own food, even though we didn't live on a farm.

 

What happened is they ripped out the yard and then had their chickens running around there so they could have the eggs. We had rabbits, which was good protein, and we raised all of our vegetables and fruits. 

My grandmother had a basement, so we preserved everything, and my grandfather made wine. Everything Old Country basically came with them in the suitcase of their heads, and I grew up that way.

 

I was in my late twenties or early thirties and started raising my own family when I discovered I had been poor. But I didn't even know I was poor because I always had food everywhere. There was an abundance of food. And if you didn't have your own refrigerator full of food, you just went next door to an aunt and uncle or an adopted aunt and uncle. There was an abundance of food and people around who loved each other.

 

You couldn't wait until you were tall enough to get up on the chair to make pasta with Nonna and cookies during the holidays, with all the laughter in the kitchen and all the stuff that happened when anything related to food happened. 

 

You landed in Sicily after a career in Silicon Valley. Share your journey.

I went to my cousins and said, "I don't know what I want to do with my life, but I know it has to do with food and wine." 

 

Europe had this program called Farm Away—now called Workaway. You basically sign up to work on people's farms. They give you room and board based on the work you do.

 

I spent multiple months—three weeks here, a week here, two weeks there—going around to different places: Sicily, Sardinia, Basilicata, Calabria, Tuscany—and even southern Spain. I lived on farms and worked in the garden, in the farming area, and in the kitchen. I did preservation. I did all this stuff. And then I came home from that experience and thought, "I'm healed. This is exactly what I needed. I don't know my path, but I have a vision for which direction to walk in." And so I did.

 

I came to Little Rock, Arkansas, and started this fun urban farm. I have this one-acre farm, and I have a little market. It's a little more sophisticated than my grandparents', of course. It's a different time than it was then. I'm not immigrating with two suitcases, but I have a beautiful farmhouse kitchen, a little market, and a small little farm area. And so I am so happy because I get to grow my own food. I get to preserve food the same way I did before. I get to teach people. 

I figured out what the next thing is in my life. I am so blessed that I got to be an Italian little girl growing up in an Italian family. And it's only right for me to share that with people because my purpose now is to teach people to grow their own food, how much food nurtures them, and how much food brings us together. And it's all that connection. It's like my story extended through this beautiful lineage that goes all the way back to Sicily and Campania.

Urbana Farmstead in Little Rock, Arkansas

 

What sustainable farming practices do you use at Urbana Farmstead, and why are they important to you?

I do everything naturally here. We don't use bug sprays, and we don't use any fertilizer. My land is planted with things like mustard, which helps us control all of the bugs, and then radishes and beets so that they can break up the soil during the winter. I've used permaculture, the natural process of farming. I brought that practice back from all my time going back and forth to Sicily and those 18 months of living on those farms.

 

One thing I learned while living on farms is that whatever you do in the field will go into your body. If you're going to take your time, expense, and investment to grow your own food, then you need the healthiest source of your food. Even if you don't personally grow your food, you should be aware of that because you're basically putting that in your body.

 

How do you cultivate community through garden-based learning opportunities?

The pandemic was hard on all of us, but it gave me this really bright opportunity because, during that period of time, most people couldn't go to normal grocery stores. They also couldn't really get out and do a lot of socialization. 

 

I had just moved to this community, didn't really know my own community, and had just built a small market. So, it became a meeting place where people would come, and of course, they came for produce or different food. But it also became a time when we could just hang outside and talk. It made me realize that my community is not dissimilar to the population I lived in as a child; it's a very underserved area.

 

The more I would talk to everybody about what I was doing and my background, the more I got to know them. And I knew during that year and a half that I was getting to know the community that I wanted to be their community garden. 

If you look at where I live, the closest grocery store is eight miles one way and 11 miles the other way. And then there are two or three Dollar Generals in between that. There's no farm; I'm literally in an industrial area.

 

I have faith and believe that God puts us all on those paths where we should be. It was pretty obvious to me during the pandemic that it was part of my responsibility to provide this community garden. 

 

 
Urbana Farmstead's Simply Sicilian Cooking Club students

Tell us about your classes and how they started.

I taught youth before I did classes for adults. That happened because, during that period, the kids were homeschooling. I had this amazing kitchen with this fiber Wi-Fi network, and almost everybody in my area had no internet. So, as I got to know the families, I asked some of them, "Why aren't your kids in school?" And they said, "Oh, we don't have the internet." So I said, "Well, come over. I have this dining room sitting here where they can plug in."

 

During the day, for almost a full year, I'd have anywhere from six to 18 kids, who were basically strangers to me at the beginning. So they would come and do their four hours of classes in the mornings. And then, of course, I'd feed them lunch and get to know them. In the meantime, I'm farming out there.

 

So I'd say, "Come on, come and pick some cucumbers for lunch." They'd say, "Oh, I don't eat cucumbers." And I said, "Really? Do you like pickles?" They'd say, "Well, yeah, I love pickles." So, I'd say, "Well, then you eat a cucumber."

 

I realized during that process I could do a garden-based learning class, which could be an afterschool program, and I could start teaching these kids about growing their own food. Just simple stuff, like using celery and making little cars, and fun things they could learn how to do. So that's how I started with my program, The Root of Change.

After that, I realized you can't just teach the kids because then they go home, and they try to get their mom to do it, and their mom's like, "What? I don't know much about fresh anything." Because they're buying their food from Dollar General.

 

I started extending my classes to adults, and now I do cooking classes: Simply Sicilian Cooking Club. I have adults and children, and I teach all kinds of different classes. So that's really how it all evolved.  

 

Describe your cookbooks: Mangiamo and Finding Your Path.

Mangiamo was published in 2023. It is a combination of my family's recipes—Napolitano and Sicilian—and weaved in are some of the recipes from the families I lived with while living in Italy and Spain. So I call it my family recipe book because a lot of those people that I lived with are definitely now part of my family. It was great because it showed how regionally different pizzas, pasta dishes, and breads are.  And people really liked that.

 

After I started releasing my book, a lot of people said, "Well, I love your book, but I'm gluten-free."

 

I have gluten sensitivity myself, as do my two daughters and one of my grandchildren. So I said, "You can adapt many of my recipes from Mangiamo." But in the meantime, I decided that I was going to go ahead and do a book focused on gluten-free.

 

I have a cousin in Sicily (Giuci Marsala) who's a full-on celiac. So I partnered with her and said, "Hey, Giuci, let me tell your story, and then let's publish this together."

 

So, Finding Your Path is still family recipes. It's not only gluten-free but also targeted toward people with celiac disease. Plus, I wrote a resource guide for what kind of products and brands to use.  

 

Urbana Farmstead's high teas feature a four-course meal.

Can you share more about your monthly high tea events?

It's high tea on the farm, which means it's basically farm-to-table. It's four courses. The Queen wouldn't approve of it, I'm sure of that because it's not your traditional English type of dainty thing. It's what you would consider Mediterranean-style cuisine.

 

I start out at the beginning, usually with some kind of homemade Italian pastry. And then we go from that. That's the first course.

 

For the second course, I always do a farmhouse soup with focaccia. And it's always seasonal, so it's like, "Go out in the garden and pick whatever you have, and that becomes a soup."

 

The third course is little sandwiches, but it's not those little dainty, sweet cucumber sandwiches. It's Mediterranean. So often, you'll get a tray of bruschetta, and there'll be different toppings on them, like a tapenade, or you might get a sausage bite with a bit of mozzarella.

 

The final course is petite desserts of some sort. And that varies depending on the season. So it's four courses.

 

You book the table, and you pick the tea. I grow 75% of the herbs that go into the tea in the garden, so you get to come and pick one of my blends. Once you book the table, you can stay there as long as you want. And then I serve you a course at a time.

 

It's a lot of fun. I love doing it. I get to be so creative. 

 

What are some of your biggest challenges?

The biggest challenge is that, from where I sit in this industrial area, people sometimes drive past me instead of stopping. It's taken me a couple of years—the first two years being very trial and error—to realize I am a destination. They have to know about me and commit to come find me.

 

It's beautiful. You go through these iron gates and say, "Voila, I'm here!" But you have to go down a road with car lots all around me.

 

But I overcame it by saying, "You know what? You just have to be a destination." And that's OK; my business is based on that.

What's been most rewarding?

My most rewarding is two things. I'm going into the fourth year of my kids' program, and I have some of the kids from four years ago, and they're growing up. They started out 10 and 11 years old, and now they're like, "Ms. Margie, can I help you? Do you have a job?" So I use them when I do high tea. They might be one of the servers, or they might be cooking in the back with me. I love that because these kids probably had between zero and 10% opportunity, and I have really seen their lives transform.

 

I feel blessed by that. Now I feel complete. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. That's probably my number one thing, and I'm anxious and excited to see where they all go and who will rise up next.

 

The other thing I'm very proud of is that I've introduced Arkansas to a way of thinking about Mediterranean. I use the word Mediterranean all the time, so there's context around it, and they understand how that's healthy. They don't think it's just a diet.

I always stress, "This is not a diet, folks; this is a lifestyle." Not only is the food important, but having food at the table makes it important because just eating while walking around, doing something in the car, or sitting in front of the TV is unhealthy.

 

You could eat an apple, but if you eat it in front of the TV, it's not healthy anymore. Health is when you sit down, have people around you, and have a conversation.

 

I'm pretty proud of that because it's moving the needle. It hasn't always been easy, but I'm starting to see some real traction.

 

I had a couple of key administrators from the University of Arkansas come to Sicily with me in October. Now, we have an exchange program between the University of Arkansas and one of the universities in Sicily. They're going to start doing student and faculty exchanges. That's a big one right there.   

 

I picked up the ball and ran with it. This is what I'm supposed to be doing, and I'm going to keep doing it. 

 

 
An Urbana Farmstead class participant makes pasta.

 

What is your ultimate goal?

The core of everything is this Mediterranean lifestyle. I hope my work lives on with the connection between the farm, food production, and the table. That's probably going to have to be one of the books I write next: that connection to the table. It's the place where we meet people, and it's the lowest common denominator. We can meet at the table, and we're all equal. I love that. That's the work I want to continue cultivating: nourishing and nurturing.

 

Whether you come and book a private event, have a high tea, or are in one of my classes, we eat together no matter what. You come and take a class. I will teach you how to make pasta, and then we will eat the pasta together. I could just teach you how to make pasta, but again, there's no closure. There's not the most important part of it because just making the food is not it. I want to keep connecting the food, the farm, the table, and the community.

 

 

Everything ultimately connects to gathering around the table.

 

 

 

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Anthony Scalabrino was always close with his paternal grandmother, the daughter of Sicilian immigrants from Trapani. As a boy, he'd mow her lawn and help with painting. Their relationship became even tighter when he entered the Naval Academy. He'd call her every Sunday between studies to muse about life and dish on how their favorite team, the Detroit Lions, was playing.

 

"I always looked up to how devout she was as a Catholic and how patient she was in getting us kids in line like a grandmother would," Anthony remembers.

 

He also fondly recalls her regular Christmas present to family members and certain friends: a bottle of her own amaretto liqueur.

 

Anthony's grandmother passed away his senior year at the Naval Academy, but he's held onto those memories, extending her legacy by creating Oak City Amaretto, his version of Grandma Scalabrino's famous recipe.

The brand is small-batch produced and sold in North Carolina today, but Anthony aims to expand that reach to include the Midwest, particularly Milwaukee, where he's currently based. He shared his plans, how he got started, how his Navy experience shaped his journey, his preferred ingredients, his favorite way to drink amaretto, his challenges, advice for other entrepreneurs, and more.

 

 

How and why did you start Oak City Amaretto?

I really wanted to have my own business or something where I could be my own boss. In the Navy, I always responded and reported to somebody else even though I was a leader. I wanted to have my own impact and change. 

 

Before I started, I asked for the family's blessing—not that I had to. I asked my aunt, uncle, and dad for permission and told them I wanted to do this. I didn't want to owe anybody anything or have anybody interfere unless I wanted to ask for their help. And they certainly gave me their blessing.

I was teaching ROTC at North Carolina State and earning my Master's degree in Computer Networks. I wasn't thinking about actively starting a business. Then I went on a tour at Raleigh Rum Company, which we partner with now, and I really loved their rum.

 

I asked my wife, Miranda, "Hey, what do you think about me making Grandma's amaretto? I don't know why I'm thinking of it, but would it be alright if I approached them with the idea?"

 

I contacted Raleigh Rum, and they said, "We're open to it. This is good stuff. But we had somebody approach us in the past, and they only wanted a fraction of the warehouse and to pay a hundred bucks a month or whatever, and it'd have to be more equitable than that."

 

We came to an agreement, and today, I use their license and tag on as one of their product lines, giving them explicit permission to manufacture my amaretto and use the brand name for the specific region.

When we started, I did everything. I bought an induction cooktop from Williams Sonoma, a stainless steel pan, and a manual paddle mixer. It starts by using a simple syrup, and you have to cook that down and reduce it. So I was doing a very large amount for me, but in reality, it was a small batch on the equipment, and I'd have to do at least 20 of those runs at a time because I didn't have anything different or more automated. 

 

I wasn't about to go into debt to start the business, so I'd make those small 160-quart batches and pour them into two 55-gallon drums. Once they cooled, I'd mix the grain-neutral spirit, almond extract, and other ingredients into the drums.

 

We initially used a vineyard-style bottler. That was interesting because it was older, and there was no float to prevent leakage. And the way you did it, you could forget two ways to turn it off, one from a 55-gallon drum pouring into it, and the other is the float in the back of the filler itself. 

We learned a lot from that experience. Then, I put a lot of the money back into the business, and the first thing we bought was a semi-automatic bottler. We tried some semi-automatic bottlers from China, and they broke within a couple of bottles filled. So, I began to search for what other options were out there.

I met a guy, Jeff, with a 250-gallon stainless steel tank for sale in Zebulon, North Carolina, just east of Raleigh. We retrofitted it with some legs, a mixer, and heating elements at the bottom. Then, we just went to town making a custom tank, and we still use it today. He taught me how to use the lave and heavy equipment, and we just scaled organically. 

I was literally pitching the product to individual bars and restaurants. I'd take breaks in between grading papers, doing my homework, and whatever else to hit the streets, do events on weekends at bars and restaurants, and enter competitions. 

How organic it's grown since the first three years has been pretty ridiculous. I continue to put in a lot of effort, but the first three years were a lot of heavy lifting and just reinvesting and seeing that money grow and put into events and things. 

 

Anthony Scalabrino and Oak City Amaretto

How is your amaretto recipe similar to or different from Grandma's?

I actually changed the recipe a little bit. I use all-natural sugars and flavors, while she used white sugar. Oak City Amaretto tastes a little bit different, but the essence is the same. I created dozens and dozens of recipes and put five or six of my finalists in front of my dad. He chose the one that I thought was the best. It's my generational touch on the amaretto. I made it something of my own, but the idea was definitely true to her recipe.

 

How did your experience as a Naval Pilot and instructor shape your journey?

It was just the entirety through the Naval Academy, becoming a pilot, leader, and independent thinker. You have the emergency procedures and documentation and things you need to follow, but I think the military service just taught me how to get shit done, for lack of better terms. And that independence allowed me to just be like, "Hey, I don't know where to start, but I'm just going to start  somewhere and do research and look into companies who can give me larger than individual portions of ingredients and raw material." So, pallets instead of truckloads. Just starting there, getting prices, finding the market fit, doing my research, and putting everything together helped me think about different variables and do my research. Attention to detail was really important as well. 

 

Tell us about your ingredient sourcing and how you ensure the quality of your amaretto.

That's something we really pride ourselves in. We try to buy all-American ingredients to differentiate ourselves. That's difficult, especially with outsourcing today. I buy from local or American distributors, but our sugar isn't from the U.S. It's from Mauritius; they're a good supplier. 

Quality and consistency are hard with small-batch. I had one supplier say, "We can't promise consistency." You would think it'd be the same from the cane. So, I had to switch suppliers to maintain that consistency.

We get sugar in 50-pound bags on pallets, so that's a super-key ingredient. I don't see the value in organic. It's important for certain things, but you need some GMOs and controls to keep up with the decline in farming. I get natural ingredients, like almond extract, so I don't have anything absurd and fake flavoring or anything.

Oak City Amaretto on the rocks

 

Do you have a favorite way to enjoy your amaretto?

My favorite is to enjoy it on the rocks with either a large ice cube or mostly crushed ice. I like chewing the ice that has been with the amaretto. One of my favorite recipes is a twist on a Tom Collins; they put some of the amaretto as the sweetener in there with some egg whites and just really fluff it up.

 

People think amaretto is something you shoot at a party or drink as an aperitif, but it can go in a lot of things, like an old-fashioned or something like an amaretto sour, but elevated with some whiskey and egg whites in there. There are a lot of different variations I didn't think existed, and I'm not the brainchild behind that, so I rely on local mixologists. I'm smarter on sales and operations, not the creative side. 

 

What have been the biggest challenges and most rewarding moments in your journey with Oak City Amaretto?

North Carolina is a control state, so you have to get approved by the state. Once you get there, you have to get approved by individual boards. The challenge is that North Carolina is the legislation and the push of continuing to roll back prohibition-era legislation. That was the biggest obstacle: getting into new boards or being OK with not being in every board.

 

Sometimes, in small rural areas, they want to pay nine bucks to have a plastic-tasting amaretto. And because it's a government subsidy or government entity, they don't necessarily pitch your product the best. Thankfully, I've made some great relationships, and that's the alternative side: when board members and store owners have surprised me and recommended the amaretto. 

The opposite side of that, going back to the hardships, is expanding out of state. And it is like a monopoly. You have the Jim Beams and the Jack Daniels. Southern Glazer's has told me, "You might not want us to represent you because we don't focus on the small brands."

 

Trying to find my way organically into the upmarket has been more difficult. But the big thing is finding the light in those receptive to that, whether or not that goes against what the market traditionally has been doing. It's running into those people who are more open to that difference. And that's been a constant joy.

 

What are your plans for the future?

Expanding to the Midwest since I'm up here now. Hopefully, that will become a reality by next year. That's the biggest thing. We're taking it in little bites. I think some people expand too quickly, and unless you have a big corporation behind you, Tito's, or something, it's hard to make that impact. My goal really is "Local small brand makes it big and shows why sourcing good ingredients matters."

 

What advice would you give to someone looking to start their own business?

I hear a lot from entrepreneurs: "I probably wouldn't have started knowing how difficult it was and is to run a small business." Do your market research. You could do something that there's a lot of, but you had better have a differentiator and know your market cap in the region. Understand, unless you have a differentiator and have the backing for marketing, you have to be okay with being regional, local, or maybe just statewide.

Bootstrapping was the best decision ever, and I still need to find the leap of faith to do this full-time. I work on the side, and that's been a help in fueling that. Some people say to wait until your income overlaps or is enough to take over and then make that leap. But you just need to take that leap of faith at some point.

 

 
Enjoying every sip: Anthony Scalabrino 

 

What experience do you hope to share?

Intentionalism and authenticity—that's the biggest thing. I don't want to lose that side of the brand and who we are. That's how we got our start, and how we've expanded—just because of the community. That's had a significant impact, and I don't want to lose it. 

 

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March 19 marks St. Joseph's Day, also known as the Feast of Saint Joseph, who is revered as the father of Jesus and the patron saint of Sicily. Legend states that Saint Joseph brought Sicily relief from famine during the Middle Ages. Faced with severe drought, the people prayed to the island's patron saint to deliver rain, promising to prepare a feast in gratitude. Rain came, the population was saved, and the people celebrated with a banquet in Joseph's name. And so began the annual tradition of preparing St. Joseph's Day altars filled with food, ranging from humble fava beans to festively decorated cuccidati cookies.

 

The custom was carried with Sicilian immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly among those who settled in Louisiana. Today, St. Joseph's Day is a major holiday, especially in New Orleans, where lavishly decorated altars appear at churches, schools, and even atop parade floats. And food is distributed to charity. 

To learn more about the history and evolution of the St. Joseph altar tradition, I reached out to native New Orleanian and historian Laura Guccione, who has written a forthcoming book on the topic and is actively involved in preserving and promoting the tradition through lectures, events, and community engagement.

 

How did the tradition of Saint Joseph's Day altars originate in Sicily?

The main story is that there was a famine and that the people of Sicily prayed to St. Joseph. And then all of a sudden, the fava bean started growing, and they ate the fava bean, which originally was fodder for animals. It saved them, and they decided to have a feast to celebrate that the famine was over. 

 

How was the tradition brought to New Orleans?

After the Civil War, people from Louisiana were trying to replace the enslaved to work on the sugarcane plantations. Sicily has a tradition of growing, but it was amid famine. After the unification of Italy, Sicily was poorer than they were before. So it was perfect timing for them to come.

 

A small Sicilian population was already in New Orleans before the Civil War. It's where the lemon trade started; from there, it grew.

 

So there are already these connections, and they started bringing people, and then the population grew and grew.

 

A lot of them were migrant workers. They settled all over Louisiana. It was mostly men. Eventually, some of them settled and stayed, and then they would have their wives come over and have children.

 

Early on, other saints' days were celebrated here, but those kind of fizzled out. After the two world wars, St. Joseph's Day really took off because people were building altars so their sons would come home safe and sound.

 

How has the celebration evolved?

You see a lot more of the altars and in different places. After Katrina, there were a lot of people moving here, and it really put people in a panic about what was going to happen and whether we would lose certain cultural traditions and rituals. But now it seems like there are a lot more of them, and it's not always Sicilians building them, erecting the altars. 

 

While Sicilians celebrate St. Joseph's Day as the feast day of the saint, the Black Masking Indians celebrate St. Joseph's Day as mid-Lent. Traditionally, the Black Masking Indians wore costumes on Mardi Gras Day and St. Joseph's Day, but around the 1980s, Super Sunday became a thing on the Sunday closest to St. Joseph's Day.

 

How can somebody who isn't in New Orleans set up their own altar and celebrate?

Traditionally, it is three layers. What I do is take some wine boxes, cover them with tablecloths, and then build it up. At the very top, there's a statue of St. Joseph, usually surrounded by St. Joseph lilies, which bloom closest to his feast day. You can just decorate with any kind of fruit, vegetables, or cookies and just go to town with that.

 

What is your hope people will take away from this celebration?

Just how important it is to continue traditions. And it's all about pride in your heritage along with the Sicilian traditions that have survived. 

 

 

Photo by Laura Guccione

 

 

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From curating art to launching a London café and landing a spot on Gordon Ramsey's highly competitive Future Food Stars, Valentina Fois's journey is full of creative turns. Though Lele's has closed, and Valentina has since moved to Rome, the brand remains successful digitally thanks to her passion for storytelling.

I sat down with her to discuss digital marketing, her Future Food Stars experience, and her take on authenticity in building a lasting brand. Plus, check out her recipe for vegan arancini!

How did you transition from art and fashion to digital marketing?

The transition came quite naturally. I have always had a passion for technology; it has always inspired me, and I'm very curious about it. So I always find myself reading and learning, and back when I used to be a curator, I did this MA in digital technologies for the art sector, which was very much about how to introduce digital technology within the art world. It could be through social media or a different way of archiving what happened to a work of art, such as coming up with ideas and different resources and having that knowledge to study combined with all the experience I had with Lele's.

Lele's had a physical community, but it was very much digital. We had nearly 30,000 followers back then. Everything was organic. We didn't invest much in advertising because I didn't have the budget back then, so that wasn't an option. So, I think what I was doing was probably done correctly because it did resonate with people. And that told me a lot about storytelling and what it means to really craft something around a brand. That's how I work right now with my customers and clients; I think about them as unique businesses and people. They all have their own story, and that story cannot be told in the same way because of the public who wants to hear the story; the segment might not be the same, and they need to be told the story in a different way because their perception is different.

So that's something I had to learn, and it's constantly changing. You need to evolve as much as the software you use; the algorithm is constantly moving. You can't fight it and say, "That's what I learned a month ago, and I'm going to stick to it." No, you need to learn. You need to progress; you need to evolve.

This is a job that many people could do. It's not a job that requires you to be a certain genius. To work in digital marketing, you need to be very open-minded, to transform yourself daily, live in time, and, like a sponge, absorb a bit of everything. When you talk about social media, it's very reductive. Because it is so integrated into everything we do, it's not just scrolling on your phone; it's the latest music, the latest trend, politics, economics, journalists, and everything on there.

 

What's been your most successful campaign to date?

Lele's is a good example of a very successful campaign. And I think the secret was that we decided to talk spontaneously and authentically. We really opened the door through the creation and cooking processes. And people appreciated that because they felt they were invited to a real kitchen to cook with a real person with real food. I think at that time, we needed a bit of authenticity, something that wasn't sleek and glamorous but just very genuine. And especially through the COVID period, people wanted to have company and wanted to be entertained, but in a friendly way. Obviously, not every brand is the same, and every brand has a tone of voice. But for Lele's, that was the winning element: the authenticity.

 

How do you measure success?

First and foremost, I measure how much I enjoy doing something. As long as I'm doing something and benefiting from it, it's successful. I don't even care about the metrics because the minute I don't enjoy myself anymore, that's not successful to me anymore. I think they go hand in hand. When you do something with dedication and believe in it, it reflects what you do. And there is a difference, and people perceive that.

Obviously, after that, the answer will be metrics. When you're talking about social media, it will be—not so much the likes—the engagement: how many times people will share. One of the most beautiful things would be when you launch a campaign, for example, to sell some cookies online and suddenly you ship them everywhere, or people come from everywhere around London or even outside London and say, "I follow you on social media. I really wanted to try those cookies." That's obviously even nicer than the like because, yes, it's great to have likes, but if you can't convert that into leads or followers.

 

You were a contestant on Future Food Stars. How did that come about?

What happened with that is that, obviously, I was very passionate about the café and the whole philosophy and ideology of being vegan and promoting healthy living and healthy eating. We weren't preaching; we weren't telling people what to do. We were just showing that there were alternatives. That created an environment that felt genuine and friendly. So we started having lots of followers and built this community around Lele's, not only online but even offline. There was a sense of family. And because of that, the team behind Future Food Stars got to see me on social media, and then they asked me.

 

Tell us about that experience and what you learned.

On a personal level, I learned that I am a little bit less diplomatic than I believed I was. It is a wake-up call when you do something; you obviously think of yourself in a way, but just because you think about yourself doesn't mean that people perceive you that way. So I always thought I was maybe a little bit calmer, but maybe I wasn't. So that's something that I had to learn and work through. So that was good. I think it's very important that you stick to your principles and what is important to you without being aggressive and with respect.

 

I was happy when I had to stick to my beliefs on several occasions. I was the only vegan on the show, and it was really a hard time. It was very frustrating. Even when we used to have lunch or dinner, there were very few things I could eat. I was on set for two months straight and was sleep-deprived, and working schedules were very tight. It was very stressful. Sometimes, we had to shoot at three o'clock in the morning. I was not used to that.

They were very good on many different levels. I met lovely people, and the production team was amazing. They were very accommodating and very lovely. But they underestimated the catering aspect.

 

What advice would you give someone interested in digital marketing?

Understand that it's a 360-degree job. It's not just about marketing, it's not just about social media, it's about life itself. You need to be on top of everything you need to know. You cannot know everything all the time. You want to have the willingness to be informed.

Study or take a course, but at the same time, put that into practice while you study. If you don't have a client, make a client up. Invent, create an Instagram account that doesn't exist, and make that your client. You can experiment and see what works and what doesn't work. 

 

What experience do you want your customers to have?

With every customer, I ensure that I tell their story, the real story, who they are, why they got to be there, and why they're doing what they're doing. That also means the way they're doing things and why. Maybe the product, if they're selling a product, is special and different from other products. But the idea is always to create a story, a narrative around them—not a narrative based on lies but a narrative based on facts. My job is just to make this narrative sexy through graphics, video, and copywriting, but I always start from their narrative. Of course, I could build a spider web of lies, and some people do this as a strategy to sell more, but I don't believe it ever pays back. It's not the way I want to work. 

 

 

 

 

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Hugo Gallardo enjoyed his job for the first 20 years of his marketing and advertising career. But at some point, he says, the fun just started to fizzle. Instead, he faced a mundane sequence of meetings, results, new business, travel, more meetings, more results, more business, and more travel. Then his wife, Annalisa, got pregnant, which made him really rethink all the meetings and travel. He was in his forties and knew he needed a change. 

"I got involved in distillation as a hobby while I was living in Australia," Hugo says. "When we started to think about what we wanted to do with our lives, we put things together. The hobby was becoming a passion."

 

Today, that drive has led him to co-found Alma Sicilian Artisan Distillery. The company produces Mater Rum and Mater Gin from sugarcane grown in Sicily, an important center of sugar production under Arab rule. 

Hugo and I spoke about Sicily's sugar history and Alma's start. He shared more about his sugarcane crops and distillation process. The former marketing executive knows how to tell a good story, something that's bound to help as the company aims to expand beyond Italy. 
 

Tell us how you got started.

I read a lot about distilling history and how the spirits we know right now have become what they are. My passion for advertising was getting lower, and my passion for distilling was increasing—the history of the different spirits, raw materials, and the agricultural parts of the raw materials. So, we decided to open a small craft distillery. The original plan was to open it in the Philippines.

But long story short, the Philippines got closed for COVID, and I got stuck in Sicily because my wife is from Sicily, and we came here to spend some time with her parents before we brought their granddaughter to the Philippines.

 

We left our housing in Milan and quit our jobs, and I started to rethink the original plan because we didn't know when they would reopen the Philippines. I had to make a decision. I decided to try to open in Sicily.

 

When I started reading about rum, I discovered sugarcane had grown in Sicily for seven centuries. So, I thought we could try it; there was good storytelling.

In the beginning, it was more of an act of faith because we didn't know where to get the seeds, if sugarcane would grow, or if the yield would be good enough to produce something in industrial terms. So, we started doing some trials.

Meanwhile, we found the warehouse when we built our distillery, and we started to buy everything we needed to be operative and then progress. It was full COVID time, so everything was closed. You had to make all the requests by email, and it was a complete pain because everything was slow. So, after three years, in January 2021, we got all the permits, and the distillery was able to start production in April of last year.

 

Co-founder Annalisa Spadaro

 

Without a background in agriculture, was farming sugarcane a challenge?

To be honest, sugarcane is an easy crop. It needs water, and it needs to be fertilized, but it's a very resistant crop. We are located outside the historical cultivation zones. There are a lot of problems with being out of the historical cultivation zones. Still, there's an advantage in that there are no diseases because there are no other sugar plantations. We cannot be infected by bacteria or fungi or whatever. 

The big challenge for us is harvesting. We have to do it by hand because it doesn't make sense to mechanize such a small plot. We are actually cultivating three hectares, which is nothing in terms of industrial production. Economically speaking, it doesn't make sense to mechanize the harvesting. And that requires a high investment in energy, work, and money.    

 

Sugarcane harvesting is done by hand.

Why did sugarcane disappear from Sicily?

The main reason was that America happened. America was discovered in the 15th century, and on his second voyage, Columbus brought with him slave labor. The soil was perfect; there was much more water available. So, the sugar in Sicily was uncompetitive in the market since American sugar was much cheaper. It wasn't profitable anymore.

 

What shocked me was that it had completely disappeared from the island's culture. The names of a few areas around Palermo are etymologically related to sugarcane, but I was curious to discover that first, no one knows about sugarcane cultivation, and second, the sugarcane industry has no remaining buildings or presence on the island.  

 

Alma Sicilian Artisan Distillery's Sampieri plot

 

You grow in Sampieri and Marina di Modica. How do the unique soil and climate characteristics influence flavor and quality?

Marina di Modica was the first plot; the soil there is almost white and retains much more water than in Sampieri, where there is red soil. Even if they are five minutes apart by car, the sugarcane grows quite differently in both places. In Marina di Modica, it is much taller, but in Sampieri, it's a little bit shorter and has a really salty flavor. We want to keep both because the first one is for our gin, and the second one, the Sampieri one, provides us with this salty olive characteristic.  

 

Yellow and purple sugarcane

 

You grow two varieties of sugarcane: purple and yellow. How do they contribute to the final product?

We are still learning about our raw products because it's the second year, and we are making some changes this year. We are using a single distillation, so the final product is different. We still have to better understand whether the difference is because of the sugarcane or the distillation method. However, the main difference is that the yellow cane has a strong olive smell, and you can feel it in the nose and the mouth. It also has this salty touch in the mouth.

The purple has this touch of wildflowers and marmalade but also truffles.

They are very different in terms of bouquet. Yellow cane is much fresher and saltier and provides our rums with something we really like: this salty olive profile. 

 

 

Alma Sicilian Artisan Distillery is the only distillery in Italy that grows and processes sugar cane directly.

 

What is unique about your fermentation and distillation process?

We are not reinventing the wheel. There is a lot of hype about natural fermentation and spontaneous fermentation, and it's something that I would like to try in the future. The thing about that is that you completely lose control of your fermentations. So it could be nice, or it could be a complete disaster.

 

Since we don't produce that much product, we wanted to start safely with the fermentation process. Last year, we used yeast; this year, we decided to change it, and we are using wine yeast.

 

We changed because the rum yeast was selected to pump certain esters and, of course, the most easy-going esters—banana and pineapple, the kinds of flavors that everyone loves. We decided to use a much more neutral yeast that shows the raw product. And we are very happy with the result.

Then, in distillation this year, we are using a small column of six plates. It's a column that we can switch off every plate. We can decide if we use the six plates, just four, or just one. It is very versatile. We just did a single distillation using the small column. Since sugarcane is a very rich raw material by itself, we felt that going with double distillation, we lost something. So, we decided to go through just one distillation.

 

Mater Rum: Made in Sicily with Sicilian plants

 

What experience do you hope to share?

There are two levels of experience. One is the people who come to the distillery; they immediately become brand ambassadors because of the location and how we work, sharing our passion, history, and what we're trying to do. I'm pretty sure the people who leave the distillery after a tasting or visit enjoy the moment. One hundred percent think that we are crazy in a positive way. 

The second level of experience is the people in a bar who are having a drink, and our product is proposed to them, or they decide to try it. And I'm pretty sure a few are surprised because it's a new provenance for Sicily.

 

Then, we provide a lot of information through our packaging and bottles, which plays a huge role in communicating what we do and want to express. In some way, I hope they get the feeling that we have just met.

 

Finally, the product: I think it's a very particular rum and not for everyone because it is white. It's not the classic Bacardi 40 degrees, 80 proof. Starting for the alcohol by volume, our rums are above 50 degrees, 100 proof, so they are much stronger in terms of profile.

 

I hope people can taste the salty olive and citrus notes—all these notes are very strong in our rums. I hope they can get a piece of Sicily with every sip.  

 

 

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It started with a meditation retreat. Traci Randolph and her husband, Jason, were looking for a meaningful way to spend their 25th wedding anniversary. They'd worked to fit it into their busy schedules and planned a weeklong stay in Cancun. A former salon owner turned Realtor, Traci had been someone who craved certainty, always needing to know what was coming next.

 

"I always had to have a plan for everything," Traci remembers. "I was uncomfortable in the unknown."

 

But while attending a meditation retreat with Dr. Joe Dispenza, something clicked, and she realized she needed to make a change and embrace the uncertainty of life.

 

She didn't know what she wanted, but, for the first time, she found comfort in that question mark. She pondered possibilities, and what resonated most with her was a strong desire to create something that would connect with people.

 

"I love real estate, and I'll continue to do that, but having a connection with people is just different," says Traci. Exploring her new mindset, she returned to regular meditation, visualizing a future where she could bring people together through joy and food.

 

Traci found a fully restored coffee cart on its way from Italy. She purchased the vintage 1959 Lambretta and named her "Angela" after her grandmother, who inspired her to cook. She went on to name her business Fiore Della Vita, meaning Flower of Life. Her logo is a powerful symbol in mediation, symbolizing creation, just like the offerings she plans to share.

 

Serving the Greater Phoenix area since late 2024, the Italy-inspired food and beverage business is available for special events and weddings. This year promises even more opportunities. It's full speed ahead into uncharted territory for their little truck, and Traci is comfortable taking the ride.

 

We chatted about Traci's background and how it inspired her, the signs that directed her, the challenges she faced, the rewards she's reaped, and more.

 

 

 

Traci Randolph's grandmother, Angela, inspired her. 

 

Tell us about your grandmother and your connection to Sicily.

My maternal great-grandparents were from Ragusa. They came through Ellis Island, so my grandmother was raised in New York. My mom was born there, and so was I before we moved to Arizona.

When my grandparents divorced, my grandma came to live with us—it was just my mom and I because my parents had divorced—so I spent a lot of time with her. I even called her Mom probably more often than I called my own mother Mom.

 

She greatly influenced me, spent a lot of time with me, and even got to know my friends. My husband and I were dating then, so she was even a part of his life.

 

She passed away when my youngest was two, and I felt it when she was gone. I was grateful I had her when I did—the culture, food, and just having that safe space in the kitchen with her. My love language is absolutely food, and she's definitely a big part of that. 

 

After your retreat, what led to your business launch?

I went to a yoga class, and the owner of the yoga studio—knowing really nothing about me—said, "You need to open a coffee shop." I kind of chuckled and thought, How does she know?

 

I explored opening a space but realized that it would be a hundred hours a week for six months. And I thought, Maybe that's not what it looks like right now. I felt like I needed to speak to my heart and my inspiration.

 

Somebody introduced me to the idea of doing a coffee cart for events. I wanted it to be very cohesive with Italian tradition.

 

I went to a happy hour with a few friends. One is an event planner. We got to talking, and I said, "This is what I'm exploring. Would you have clients that would be interested in something like this?" And she said, "You have to do this."

 

I went home and told my husband. Then, I Googled "Italian coffee cart." Up comes this image of a Lambretta, and on the windshield, it says, "Congrats, Traci!" And it's spelled with an "i," like my name's spelling, which is extremely rare.

 

I was just getting sign after sign after sign.

 

I went to my husband's office, and my daughter pointed to the car in front of us. On the license plate, it said, "Coffee." And I said, "I need to find a truck."

 

I had looked at different trucks from Italy. There's one called an Ape from the Vespa brand, and they're really cute, but I'm seeing them recreated a lot—even China is recreating them.

I wanted something more authentic, more chic. My dad was a car salesman for 40 years, so I have a Cadillac. I wanted something a little bit higher-end and rare. And then I found the Lambretta.

A dealership out of San Francisco was advertising it on Facebook. I contacted them. They called me a few days later and said, "It's available and on its way from Italy. We can transport it to you if you want it."

 

So, all the numbers lined up the way I wanted them to. 

   

A young Traci poses with her grandmother.

How does the truck reflect your Sicilian heritage and grandmother's legacy?

One thing that was important was that because she was so petite, we wanted to have something really small and compact. I could have gone with a horse trailer. A lot of people are buying horse trailers. They're easy to find and inexpensive to modify.

 

But as I said, I wanted it to be more cohesive and feel Italian.

 

My grandmother would've really loved the cute little compact car and riding around in it. It definitely speaks to who she was. There's the sleekness. And she was just funny, too. The truck is comedic in how small it is and how it runs around. It's cute.

 

It's a lot more work than doing the horse trailer. But I wanted it to be more elegant—something people would want to have in front of their homes.

 

"Angela" parked and ready for business

You plan to start serving food. Tell us about that.

I'm getting licensed to do the catering. I want to do more appetizers. I'm not looking to really do full-catered dinners. I have other resources: people who will do the full dinner part of it, and my daughter will be doing charcuterie and grazing boards. She's absolutely amazing in that. But we'll do arancini, pizzelle, and biscotti.

 

The one thing that my grandma made before she passed away was stuffed squid. That was a big thing for us because it's labor-intensive. 

 

When I have made that, people go crazy. I had New Year's Eve here, and I made it. So we could probably do that in smaller bites. 

 

Traci sets "Angela" up for a bridal expo appearance.

How do you tailor your offerings to fit different themes?

We are having one party for a Persian couple, who want beverage taps. And so we're going to do cold brew on one tap and espresso on another tap, and then for the other one, we'll probably do a Pellegrino base. There are different Persian drinks that we will create with that.

 

These are going to be non-alcoholic just because of the location of the truck for the venue, but we can also do espresso martinis and cater those to different flairs.

 

I am excited because my creative abilities will be able to come out. We're even scheduling a tasting where we will come up with some ideas and have them pick one or two.

 

I did have somebody ask, "What if I wanted four taps?" I asked, "When's your wedding?" They said it was in 2026, and I said, "I think we might be able to get that done."
 

What challenges have you faced?

The biggest thing is the permitting. Just getting everything dusted. I've had contractors help me, but one of the things that I take pride in is that I've been doing a lot of the build-out myself. So, taking the time to do it myself has been a learning curve because I've never done anything like that before.

 

There's an amazing Facebook group of coffee entrepreneurs, and it's a great resource. I've learned a lot from that.
 

"Angela" prepared for a magical night

What experience do you hope to share?

It's really about bringing people together and having it be fun. Even at the expos, seeing people smile and come up and say, "Oh my gosh, it's so cute!" Even just the conversation piece was really what I wanted, something that people would want in the background, along with the food and all that is also just extra.

 

It's really nice when you can bring joy like that to people. That was the biggest thing I really meditated on: being in that environment where people are happy and celebrating something, and you're just being able to be part of that. 

 

 

 

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2024 was a busy year for Rita Prisco, and for once, it wasn't just because of family life for the Queens, New York-based mom of 22-year-old triplets. Somehow, between serving up regular (and frequently viral) TikTok videos to her nearly 500,000 @cucinapalermo fans, she managed to publish not one but two cookbooks—Cucina Palermo: My Homemade Cookbook and Cucina Palermo: Savoring Sicily—and Piccola Francesca, which she envisions as the start of a children's book series.

It all began with a simple spaghetti recipe and a desire to present Sicilian cuisine authentically. She never imagined she'd be competing with professional chefs and cookbook authors. And that homemade approach has proved to be a winning formula. 

Rita shared with me her connection to Sicily, how her incredible journey started, what makes a viral recipe, her future plans, what's been most rewarding, and more. 

  

 

What is your connection to Sicily?

Both my parents are from Sicily. My father grew up in the city of Palermo. He passed away, but I have family in Balestrate, which is more of a beach area, so we would go there when I would go to Sicily. My mother's from a small town called Bisacquino, which is a couple of hours from Palermo. I also have family there still. 

Can you share more about your journey?

Like any other kids, my kids were obsessed with TikTok, but it was more of them doing the dances and all that stuff. And I saw that they were obsessed with it, and it annoyed me that every time I looked for my kids or needed them for anything, what were they doing? They were on TikTok. So I would be upset about it a bit, like, "What the hell? What's going on? You just got to get off of TikTok."

 

And they were like, "Ma, you should watch it. It's not just dancing." They were like, "There's so many other things on TikTok. There are cleaning hacks, and there's cooking."

 

So I started watching the cooking because I am obsessed with cooking, and I noticed that there was no Sicilian food. It was all the food you would see at restaurants on the Italian American menu.

 

I was telling my kids, "Girls, this is not how I ate growing up." And they're like, "Well, why don't you post a video?" I was like, "No. Mommy doesn't do that."

 

It took them months and months of encouraging me that I could do it. So, I just did one to see what would happen and make my kids happy. Literally overnight, it went viral, and it was the foundation recipe, like a staple in my house that I cooked.

 

In a week, I had a hundred thousand followers, and I said, "You know what? Obviously, there's a want for this."

 

People enjoyed it. It was a refreshing thing to them, something that is easy, we could all make, and it looks delicious. It was like people were thirsty for food that actually was real.

So I did another one, and that went viral. Then, another one went viral, and from then on, most of my videos went viral.

 

Rita Prisco with her first cookbook

 

You're now also a published author. Tell us about that experience.

It took a year of people telling me, "You should have a cookbook." And that was another thing that was out of my league mentally. Never in a million years did I think that I would be able to do that! 

I spoke to publishers who were reaching out to me, and it was very intimidating. I didn't want the whole process of writing the cookbook with a publisher. I didn't want any part of it. It was too professional. That's not me. I'm not a chef. I'm not a writer. I'm just a wife and a mom who learned how to cook from her mom and her grandmother. I'm just doing those recipes and having a professional cookbook with professional photos and writers and bloggers, and all that was not a representation of who I am. 

So I said to myself, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it my way. I called my first cookbook My Homemade Cookbook because I didn't want to compete with professionals and be criticized. So, I just laid it out there from the beginning.

 

I did it at home with my daughter, and I warned everybody that that's what they were going to get. So if they were looking for anything different, look someplace else, not in my book. And that's another thing that people enjoyed and were drawn to. They were like, "Wow, that's what we want. We don't want a professional cookbook."

 

How many cookbooks do we have in our house that we never use? Because the minute you open them, they're so intimidating, like, "Oh my God, is this the Bible? What are we doing here?" It's like too much. 

I did my second cookbook because there are so many recipes. I do 50 at a time; it's what I can handle.

 

Then, when I saw the response that I had from people, the connection… I always dreamed of writing a children's book about my childhood and growing up with Sicilian parents in America. But obviously, that couldn't have been done because without a following, without people knowing who you are, it's hard to start writing a book, and then who will buy it if you don't have the exposure.

 

Once I had the exposure, I saw I could do it. So that's where Piccola Francesca came in, and I'm so proud. I feel like I'm more proud of it than I am of my cookbooks because Piccola Francesca is a story of my life. And it's going to continue. That was the first of many to come.

 

It's been amazing with that book because so many people also related to it. And you don't only have to be Italian or Sicilian to relate to it. It's something that other cultures could relate to. 

So many schools are calling me; they want me to come read. And I've been doing that.  

 

How has your Sicilian heritage influenced your cooking and the recipes you share?

They're the recipes that my mom made growing up: peasant food. My mom grew up during the Depression, when there was no steak. It had to be a holiday to have meat. So there was a lot of pasta and potatoes; everything was made with homemade flour. They would turn a piece of old bread into a dessert. (I have one recipe in my cookbook where you take stale bread and turn it into a cookie.)

 

When I was growing up, my parents weren't poor the way they were when they grew up. They had money, but it didn't matter because even though it was peasant food, per se, it was food that we loved that was delicious, like beans, lentils, and split peas.

 

And the same thing with my kids. If you introduce these foods to your children from when they're born, they grow accustomed to them. So that's what happened to me. 

 

Which of your recipes has received the most attention, and why?

There are a few recipes that have exploded. My first one has over 5 million views. That's my spagetata. People were shocked that you can make delicious pasta like that with just a few ingredients. It costs almost nothing to make. Every region makes it its own way. They put a little twist to it, and it's theirs. So, that is a staple in all of Italy.

 

Another one of my recipes that just blew up with millions and millions of views was my chicken cutlets. I think that those weren't as traditional. What happened is that I have a different way of cutting a chicken cutlet, which is fork tender because you're cutting against the grain. And nobody ever saw that in their life. 

You would think a butcher would know this. I actually now have a butcher in my town who takes orders of chicken cutlets "Rita's way," cut the way I cut them because when you cut a chicken cutlet my way, it becomes so tender, and it's so much better. And now they know and say, "We would never cut chicken cutlets the way we used to."

 

People also love my pasta dishes. My pasta dishes all go viral because there are only three or four ingredients. And people like simplicity. They're tired. They work very hard. And if you can make their life easier, they could feed their family without the extra work. That's what they're looking for. 

That's what I focus on every day. When I know I'm going to show somebody a recipe, I ask, "Is this going to make their life better and easier?" And that's all I'm going to do. Can I make complicated stuff? Of course. But I don't even show that to people.

 

My mom's fig cookies for Christmas take hours and hours of work, but I made a recipe that tastes just like my mom's fig cookies, and it's done in a half hour. That's what I look for when I'm looking for a recipe. I'm looking for something simple with a few ingredients that's going to taste good. It has to have those three components. And I feel like once you have those three components, you have a winner. 

 

What are your plans for future projects?

I'm going to continue putting out a new children's book, always with the same character. I'm going to focus on Francesca. I want to introduce other stories of growing up with immigrant Sicilian parents and the differences between that and being an American child with American parents and grandparents. So many things make us different, including our traditions. And I have a lot of stories from my childhood. 

 

What has been the most rewarding part of your journey?

I think the most rewarding part for me is the people who reach out to me. I try my best to read as many comments and emails as I possibly can. I have people who are in hospice. I have people fighting fourth-stage cancer that I communicate with often who tell me that while they're doing their chemo, they watch me, and it brings a smile to their faces. The fact that I could distract somebody a little from their suffering, even for those few minutes, is all worth it to me.

 

So many people lost their moms or their grandparents at a younger age. They miss their grandmothers or their moms who used to cook for them like this, but they never thought of writing things down. I'm giving them recipes for food they never thought they would make, and they're so happy because I remind them; I bring them memories of their childhood. That is the most rewarding thing in the world.

 

@cucinapalermo Make spagetata with me!🇮🇹 #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #cooking #italiancooking #pasta #goodeats ♬ original sound - Rita

 

 

 

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With two parents from Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, Gina Montalbano's upbringing was rooted in tradition. Part of that was recognizing that her family had ties to viticulture. Her father had worked in vineyards, and she always heard about her mother's family wineries and vineyards. 

After a career in education for Gina, who holds a doctorate in educational leadership, and in the Army for her husband, Bryan Zesiger, a retired Major, the Kansas-based couple found themselves drawn to winemaking and decided to pay Gina's Sicilian family a visit in December 2018.

"We were driving down this road with Gina's cousin, and there are vineyards all on both sides," remembers Bryan. "We're in this little Fiat, and I'm like, 'Hey, when are we going to see your vineyard?' Because I was thinking he's got a little section. He goes, 'Oh no, these are all of our vineyards.'"

It was an eye-opener. "We were like, 'What we're doing in Kansas is small in comparison,'" says Gina. 

Their former home operation has evolved into Z&M Twisted Vines Winery and Vineyard, which has a Lawrence, Kansas, vineyard and tasting room and a Downtown Leavenworth, Kansas, winery. 

Gina and Bryan remain resourceful, turning mistakes into opportunities and waste into treasured products. It's part of learning and growing but also core to their identities.

"That's part of my heritage," Gina says. "And so that pulls through with Bryan's military endeavors. He's lived around the world where people don't have what we have. We're always thinking of how to repurpose and reuse things and make the best of a bad situation. That's how we ended up just trying to build variety within what we do."

 

Gina shared more about the journey, influences, challenges, and Z&M's sustainable practices. 

 

 
Z&M opened its vineyard to the public in 2020 and hosts regular events.

How did you get started?

Bryan had served 26 years in the Army, and I was an elementary principal. We were both at a point in our careers where we could do something different if we wanted and retire from what we were doing. So, we decided to get started on the endeavor and make wine, not just as a hobby.

 

People were very encouraging, saying, "Hey, you guys should do this. Your wine is really good. I think more people would like it."

That's when we bought the building in Downtown Leavenworth, which is a three-story building, but the cellar is where we were producing. And then it has a back garage, so it was kind of like seriously old-school wine-making. We were crushing grapes in the back garage, carrying them down in big totes into the cellar, and making wine in that location—literally handcrafting. 

We had about 300 six-gallon glass carboys; you get about 28 bottles out of a carboy. But as we continued, we were like, "There is no way we can keep up this way with just the two of us, but also in such small quantities." We needed to be able to do larger batches. So we were like, "OK, we need some land. We're going to be farmers. Let's grow our own grapes."

We bought the property with the Lawrence address in 2019 and planted our vines. They're on year six, so we get our own harvest and work with other vineyards that don't have wineries attached to them. Now that we're big enough and making enough product, we contract with other growers and use our grapes plus theirs, and then we also do lots of other fruit wines. 

We've added our own personality and twist to everything. We hope people enjoy hearing our story through the labels of the wine and the flavors we're putting together. At this point, we craft about 50 different wines: reds and whites, traditional drys, and a little semi-sweet. Those are all Kansas-grown grapes. Everything is made here, from this area, and on our property. 

At the vineyard, the building that we are currently in is a big Quonset. Our harvest center has a wine-making side; we can invite guests for tastings. And so it's a labor of love, but at the same time, it's our opportunity for growth. We are adding an automated bottling line. That will change the trajectory of the amount of time it takes us to hand-bottle everything and help us be more efficient with our time and opportunity for distribution.

 

Gina with her family in Sicily

 

How has your Sicilian heritage inspired you?

The very first wine that we made came from my grandfather's recipe and wine-making techniques, and it's called Harvest Moon. The label is a throwback to a vineyard with a big harvest moon. It's one of my family's white wine recipes. We leave the skins on the grapes, which is kind of an old-school Sicilian tradition because the flavor comes from those. Here in the States, whites are typically just pressed and crystal clear. 

It's just been a lot of fun because we've done some very traditional things as we started our farm winery and utilized some of my grandfather's recipes.

 

Z&M crafts about 50 different wines with Kansans-grown grapes.
 

What challenges have you faced along the way?

Bryan and I didn't grow up as farmers, and we're not from Kansas. I know elementary lingo/education talk, and Bryan knows the military, so we're learning a new language. 

When we both retired, we lost our communities. It's like, who are our people? Who's the go-to person we ask questions? And we're both very driven to learn as much as we can. We joined as many things as possible to get involved in and learn more. We watched a lot of YouTube videos, and we talked to other people.

 

There was the hurdle of becoming farmers or owning a vineyard in Kansas, a state that hasn't been super well-known for grape-growing and wine-making since prohibition, and alcohol laws in the state have been slow to change. 

 

Hurdle two was the upscaling of recipes, going from six gallons at a time to 250-gallon tanks and then 500-gallon tanks. There was a point where wine got messed up, and Bryan came back to me, saying, "We have about 500 gallons of wine that I don't think is going to be OK." And I'm like, "What do you mean? That's a lot of money. That's a lot of time. We've got to fix it."

 

And so I said, "Don't dump it out. We're not going to make vinegar. Let's come up with a new plan."

 

American brandy is cognac, and cognac is made from white grapes. And so it's essentially distilled wine that is aged. Bryan learns all this through studies, and he and I are looking stuff up. Before we knew it, we were like, "OK, we can take this wine and distill it and then age it and make it brandy." 

In our research, we learned we could add brandy back to our wine and make what's called fortified wine, which becomes an American version of port wines.

 

It allowed us to transition and make a product, so there's a whole line of wine through this adversity that we now call Double Tap. They are all at 20% ABV and made with our own in-house brandy. It turned out to be a good accident in disguise. 

 

Bella Vino soaps and Twisted Lips 

Speaking of resourcefulness, tell us about your Bella Vino line.

It started with the home wines we were making. I love coffee, just like every Sicilian. So, the concept of "Let's make a coffee wine" came into play. 

We made our first coffee wine using real coffee beans and ground coffee. One day, we were bottling the coffee wine. We had filtered off and racked off, and a lot of residue was left from the coffee grounds. My stepdaughter Aspen was YouTubing videos while we were working in our basement. 

I had promised her that when we finished, we would do something that she wanted to do. Well, she wanted to make a body scrub. She was looking up recipes for making homemade body scrubs, and we were listening to her videos while we were bottling. And Bryan was like, "Hold on: exfoliant. These coffee grounds are rich, rustic, and scratchy. Maybe we could use those and make our own recipe based on one of these videos you're looking at."

 

So, it became the family project that night to make this scrub, and that was the birth of Bella Vino. It didn't come to fruition as an actual LLC or company until 2019. We had opened the doors, and we were making wines. And we were like, "We should not forget what we were doing with the leftovers." And so we started the Bella Vino line. There are little chapsticks, sugar scrubs for your lips, and body scrubs. Then we said, "Well, if we make this, we can surely make other products." 

We found a local farmer's wife making soap, and I asked, "Do you think you could make soap with the other leftovers I have?" And so we went through that process and figured out how we had to dehydrate things or whatever, but then we could use those fresh leaves from the tanks. And so we started making soaps, body scrubs, and what we call Twisted Lips. (I got to design a little container that looks like a wine glass. And so when you twist off the top of the little wine glass, it's your chapstick inside.)

 

When we bottle, we end up at the tail end with four or five bottles of what was still left in the lines and the tanks. We didn't want to put it in a box and tape it closed with only four bottles, so we had all of these boxes with random wines in them.

 

We said, "We should make these into jelly," and then we started making our wine jelly. So, every single bottle of wine left over from when we finish up those extra bottles becomes jelly. 

Being kind of frugal is a Sicilian thing; it's just how I grew up. My dad worked, and his English was not great. He became an American citizen, worked at the same factory I can remember as a kid, and built his family of five kids. We all went to college. It's about hard work and taking pride in who you are; that's who I am because of my parents. 

I was kid number four, so there were lots of hand-me-downs from my sisters. You don't always get new things; you're always thinking of how you can repurpose and not waste stuff. 

 

Z&M Twisted serves appetizers, paninis, hot dogs, and brats with wines, ciders, mocktails, and more.

 

What experience do you hope to share?

Wine doesn't have to be pretentious; like any good Sicilian cooking, your family meal draws people together.

 

Wine is our way to draw people together. And so we serve food at the vineyard, too. The idea is to reach people of all different ethnicities and age groups. We want them to come for the wine, but it's the experience they leave with; the idea that it brings people together is part of what we do. 

Grapevine roots are like trees. The deeper the roots go, the better your vines do. So, we want to build deep roots in a community we're not from. To do that, we must invest time in our community, not just trying to sell wine. That's never been the goal. 

 

 
Z&M Twisted's Lawrence, Kansas, vineyard

 

 

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