When a territory becomes a story

Architect, photographer, food writer. Apulian by birth, nomadic by vocation, he crosses Italy in search of food and wine infatuations. The flavours and images that catch in his memory become stories. He writes for Food&Wine Italia, Foster, Italia Squisita and his blog Il Ventre dell'Architetto. He lives and works between Apulia and Sicily.

Viviana Buscemi is Co-Founder and Owner of Essence of Sicily, a DMC specialising in tailor-made luxury travel and experiences in Sicily. She founded Essence of Sicily in 2014 after more than ten years in tourism at the helm of her own agency. Her deep knowledge of the territory and great passion for culture, gastronomy, historical heritage and above all the people who make Sicily unique led her to build a company recognised and valued by the leading international luxury-travel operators. Under her guidance Essence of Sicily stands out for authentic, exclusive and highly personalised experiences that go beyond traditional tourist routes, bringing guests into contact with the island's most genuine side: from gastronomic excellence to wineries, from artisans to Sicilian families, to places and encounters normally hard to reach. Essence of Sicily is recognised by major international luxury-travel networks and consortia, including Virtuoso Signature, Ensemble, Travel Leaders Network and Montecito. Viviana remains personally involved in designing experiences and itineraries, with the aim of telling an authentic, sophisticated and surprising Sicily through its people, its stories and its most special places.

Helena Attlee is a bestselling non-fiction author. For many years she led garden tours in Italy and wrote about Italian gardens. Her latest book, The Fire in The Mountain: Sicily, Etna and Her People, was published in April 2026 and will be broadcast as BBC Radio 4's 'Book of the Week' in August. The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and its Citrus Fruit was a Sunday Times bestseller; it was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman travel writing prize, won the Guild of Food Writers' Book of the Year, and earned Helena an award from the Accademia Internazionale del Bergamotto for her contribution to the knowledge and appreciation of Italian citrus culture around the world. Her books have been published in several languages, and The Land Where Lemons Grow will be translated into Italian later this year by Touring Club Italiano. Helena teaches creative writing in Britain and abroad and runs academic writing workshops for PhD students at universities across Britain.

Fabrizia Lanza was born in Palermo on 8 March 1961 and left Sicily at 18. She graduated in Humanities with a focus on Art History and worked for twenty years in museums. At 45 she closed her life as an art historian and decided to return to Sicily, where her mother Anna had founded a cooking school. Fabrizia began working with her mother, who introduced her to the American public; in 2007 she found herself at a Boston University conference speaking about ritual foods in Sicily. Gradually she took the reins, helping Anna, travelling, shaping the school's programmes and building new contacts. Since 2009 she has directed the school, hosting workshops with chefs, designers and writers on food and the Sicilian land; in winter she runs Cook the Farm, a six-week course on the relationship between agriculture and food. She travels regularly to the United States, cooking and producing Sicilian events in the best restaurants on both coasts — Alice Waters' Chez Panisse among them — and has lectured on Sicilian gastronomy at Boston University's Master in Gastronomy, Harvard, Berkeley and Yale. She has produced and directed short documentaries on the foods of the feasts of St Joseph and St Lucy, Amuri on festive food in Sicily, and Amaro on bitterness as an identity trait of Sicilian food. She is the author of Olive, a history of oil (Reaktion, London 2011), two cookbooks — Coming Home to Sicily (Sterling 2010) and Food of Sicily (Artisan, 2023) — the memoir Tenerumi (Manni 2019) and L'ultimo dei Mosù (Mondadori 2023).

Francesco Fisotti opened Gelateria Fisotti in 2012 in Otranto, building over time a very personal identity, which he himself defines as “authentic, funky, hipster gelato, but for everyone”. Born in 1986, he trained at Gelato University, Babbi and Gelato Naturale Academy, with masters such as Pino Scaringella and Roberto Lobrano, as well as through intense practical experience. Production is based on milk from a farm about ten kilometres from the gelateria, local fruit, nuts selected from different parts of the world and cocoa masses of various types. No flavouring pastes, industrial nut pastes, ready-made bases or emulsifiers are used in the workshop. The specialities include iconic flavours such as cellina olive, wild rocket, olive oil with taralli alla contadina, cucumeddrha with fresh wild mint, fig sorbet, Apulian almond and, more recently, pistachio made in Puglia. The gelateria appears in the Gambero Rosso guides and in the Dissapore rankings and also stands out for a creative soul beyond gelato: Fisotti is a record label that produces vinyl records, underlining the bond between gelato, music and pop culture.