Hard to believe, but the restoration of my family home in Modica is finally over and loveSicily finally has a new building for the cookery school.

We spent a year running after builders, plumbers, carpenters, architect, ect... and, by last May, the delays and the problems started to get their toll.

I seemed to have lost the ability to appreciate the beauty of the place and to have forgotten the final goal. With all feelings for the place buried under a pile of working papers and bills, with the joy for every single improvement disappearing with each discussion and phone call with contractors, I could just focus on the daily issues to solve and kept referring to the house as "the building site".

Then, at the end of August, my father started to finish restoring my grandparents furniture bringing their bedside tables, their armchairs, their piano back to life and it began to hit me: the dream was coming true.

The day the workers left, silence got finally hold of us, we sat on chairs still rapped in cellophane on the terrazza, we were able to enjoy the view again, we had done it! The fight with a stubborn old building was over, we had managed to turn it back into our home and from that day I began to refer to it as "Our House" again.

What followed, was an enjoyable walk down "shopping lane" for the right lamps, the right table cloths, the right cooker and kitchen tools, the right plants for the terrazza, etc. It was still quite hard, as anything we got needed to be taken up 80 steps to the house, but definitely worth it.

By the end of September, we finally hosted the first cookery course in our own house and it felt absolutely great. I cannot describe the joy of welcoming the guests in the house and rediscover its beauty through their eyes. The kitchen proved to be the most successful area of the house as it fully achieved our goal of combining comfort and beauty while retaining its 1920s-1930s feeling. Cooking there felt great, S. , E. and K. with their warm personalities made it even more enjoyable and after lunch we kept chatting around the table with a cup of coffee in our hands, until the time for the excursions arrived.
We have run other classes since with the same results and the enthusiasm has grown even further. Watch out for more pictures in the future.