Italy Culinary Tour

I started this illustrated Italy Culinary Tour blog series right after I came back from Italy in 2017. My husband and I went on an intense bus tour across Southern Italy, before taking the high speed train from Napoli (Naples) to Milan, the Lombardy-region city (aka, Lombardia in Italian) I’m deeply in love with. On our tour, I carried a generic small sketchbook in my bag, and a larger and heavier one that I kept at the hotel for evening-time sketching. The small sketchbook had flimsy papers and was bound by coil, which made scanning the sketches quite difficult to achieve. Lesson learnt: After this trip I invested in a couple of better-quality stitch-bound sketchbooks in different sizes. Anyhow, on this trip, I made it a point to document the foods and places we went to in a series of quick pen-and-ink sketches in both sketchbooks. Using Japanese pigment pens with different fine-line nib sizes, I drew authentic Italian sweets from Napoli, out-of-this-world pasta dishes we enjoyed in Milan, delicious pizza we had in Casandrino, and the best oven-baked potatoes we savoured at a beautiful hotel in Lecce. This Italy Culinary Tour series is dedicated to my Italian husband, beautiful Italy, and its exquisite food culture. This series is part of the Illustrated Travel Stories blog series.