Bringing Italian Rustic Home: Shopping in Umbria and USA

One of the funnest parts of restoring a home in Italy, or even building an Italian Rustic style home anywhere else in the world - is the chance to pull together elements that have a story. Tiles, fireplaces, bricks and stones can give any home an almost instant sense of history and place. This is one of the reasons why I wrote Italian Rustic, with my husband, Italian architect Domenico Minchilli.  It was a chance to explore the various building blocks that make up rustic architecture in central Italy.

While I could have dallied, writing about the ins and outs of construction techniques (like building walls and laying floors) forever, my editors at Artisan (Thank you Ann! Thank you Ingrid!) had the brilliant idea of including ways that readers could 'Bring it Home.' That inspired idea - plus sections on Italian artisans and sources - makes for some of the most useful sections in the book. In these sections I had the great fun of exploring ways that readers could bring Italian rustic elements into their homes, piece by piece.

When we restored our own home in Umbria, we gathered salvaged elements like doors, tiles, beams and mantlepieces to bring our ruin back to life. (You can read more about this in my last book, Restoring a Home in Italy). One of our main resources was Lacole, which - in the 18 years since we first restored our home - has expanded and grown. This year they inaugurated a new, huge and splendid show room in Umbria.

Lacole was started byDante Radicchi about fifty years go. He began by stockpiling salvaged wooden beams from dismantled buildings in Umbria and Tuscany. He eventually traveled throughout Italy and began amassing a collection that now includes roof tiles, flooring, fireplaces, sinks and garden statues. His daughter, Velia took over the business several years ago and has expanded to include the new, incredibly gorgeous 30,000 sq. meter warehouse (made entirely - of course!- from salvaged materials). Her husband, Enzo Belli, has taken part of the original business, and developed it into Porte del Passato, making and restoring doors.

“We take a lot of pride in what we do,” says Velia, “And our clients have come to depend on the quality of the material we stock. We not only search out the material, we carefully edit it down so that the client gets his money worth. For instance, although there are a lot of salvage yards these days, you often take risk when buying a big batch of tiles or flooring.” Lacole carefully takes out any damaged or cracked elements before batching them for shipping. Which is pretty incredible when you take a look the mountains of tiles they inventory.

“We try to leave the pieces exactly as we find them," says Velia, “We don’t like to clean up, or restore terracotta or stone. Even if they have a little dirt on them, I would rather ere on the side of doing too little. When you are buying a old tiles, or a fireplace, I think you’re partly paying for a bit of age and wear, no? We would never take that away.”

While Lacole is happy to ship anywhere in the world, you can contact some of their partners in the States if you can't make it to Umbria. Chateau Domingue, in Houston, has a luscious selection of not only Italian elements, but salvaged bits from all over Europe.

One of the best sources in the States for salvaged elements from central Italy is Tuscan Resource. They not only bring home authentic floorings, stone work and tiles, they also work closely with artisans who still produce authentic objects in wrought iron, terra cotta and wood.

Travel Italy, eat locally and help save the world?

I am bombarded daily with travel queries for Italy. They are almost all the same: Do you know a great villa to rent in Tuscany? What is the best seaside resort in Italy? Can you send me your list of restaurants in Rome/Florence/Venice? I'm always happy to oblige, and almost always have the obvious (at least to me) answers. At the same time I try to get friends to experience an Italy that is not so obvious. Many of my friends are chronic foodies, and so are always on the prowl for that undiscovered trattoria, that hard-to-find cheese, or a type of pasta that is only made by one family in a god-forsaken town in the hills of southern Italy. Here too, I am happy to open my little black book. But now my role has become that much easier since (finally!) Slow Food has re-issued what I consider to be one of its most useful (in every sense of the word) publications: Il Buon Paese.



Since 1986 Slow Food has been dedicating itself to the salvation of local and traditional foods and culinary traditions. Started in Italy, it is now a world-wide organization numbering over 100,000 members. Early on Slow Food realized that simply saving seeds or rare breeds alone wasn't gonna do it. They needed to connect farmers and food artisans to potential customers so that they could thrive. I think that one of their best, yet undervalued, tools for doing this was the guide book, Il Buon Paese, first published in 2000.


I cherished my copy and lent it out only to good friends who I knew would hand it back to me when they were done. The book carefully tracked Italy, region by region, with over 2000 entries on food producers and artisans up and down the boot. While you could find the most authentic cheese, oil and salumis in each region, it also went beyond that holy trinity to include fruits, vegetables, grains and more. This precious book not only lead me - and myriad other food obsessed travellers - to hidden treasures, it allowed us to support these artisans by providing a much-needed customer base.

But my copy was getting dog earred and it had been out of print for a while. Which is why I was so happy that a new, updated edition has hit the shops. But now the bad news: like most of Slow Food's best and most useful publications, Il Buon Paese is only published in Italian. And, I guess that is why it is only available for sale in Italy. (at least that is what it says on their web site.) I have a feeling that your local bookstore can get it for you, but at least for the moment it seems to be impossible to direct order it from Slow Food.

But, if you do end up renting that villa in Tuscany or going to the seaside in Puglia, try to get yourself to a local bookstore. With a copy of Il Buon Paese in your hands you'll not only end up off the beaten track, you'll be eating well (duh!) as well as helping to support local, sustainable and traditional culinary traditions. Not a bad thing to add to a holiday.

Trading Italian Rustic for New York Chic

We just came back from a fantastic vacation in New York. Even though we do this almost every year, each time it’s a completely new experience. This is because we always manage to stay in a different, extraordinary apartment each time. So many people ask how we manage this, that I thought it was worth writing about.

We are swappers. (No, I don’t trade in Domenico, my Italian architect husband for a different model) We exchange our five-bedroom villa in Umbria for a week in a fantastic flat in NY. I recently wrote a short piece about this in Town & Country, but since they don’t post any content online (hard to believe) it’s worth going over again. (although here is a link to a pdf of the piece).