Dining on Marika’s Patio with our Heart of Italy Tour

We’ve been meeting Marika at her home — high above the coast of the enchanting town of Positano — for homemade Italian meals with ingredients fresh from her garden for years now on our Heart of Italy tours.

We feast on her stunning back patio overlooking the Mediterranean, and after the meal, we help her in the kitchen making biscotti or other Italian treats — she gives instructions, we do the work of adding the ingredients and shaping the dough while she tells us stories about living in a coastal Italian town and running her small convenience shop.

In Marika’s normal, pre-COVID life, she and her brother own a small convenience shop where they sell a bit of everything. The shop was completely closed during the lockdown in Italy for months, halting their income entirely. Now, they’re able to open for a bit on the weekend when a few tourists trickle into town, but during the rest of the week, Positano feels like a ghost town.

Marika says that when lockdown hit, “the quarantine closed me off at home with two teenage daughters busy studying, and left me very nervous.”

She explains how she has spent her time during the lockdown: “I cleaned and cleaned the house, kneaded bread, pizza, and sweets. Fortunately, I have a large flower garden and an even larger vegetable garden, so I work a lot there between flowers and vegetables to keep busy.”

The view of Positano from Marika’s patio

When we called and asked if she would be interested in hosting cooking classes via Zoom, she immediately jumped at the chance, even though it was a brand new experience for her. She says, “The cooking classes with The Table Less Traveled have given me the opportunity to continue sharing two passions I love: food and hosting people in my home. It is just a different way of being together now.”

After receiving her share of just three pizza classes that she taught in March, when we first launched, she told us it was the amount she and her brother would have made in TWO WEEKS of working every day at the store.

Her brother is expecting his first child this year, so they were extra nervous about not having money coming in right now. The contributions from our classes have given Marika’s family a bit of peace of mind during a scary time.

If you’re wanting to hang out with Marika, join us in one of her upcoming classes!