Lina Vitali has definitely been in the kitchen. When she walks down the long garden pathway to greet me, she is wrapped in a full-length pinafore-style apron sprinkled with flowers. She whisks me through the gates, past a garden full of herbs, tomatoes, and trees laden with quince, and into the house, whose walls are lined with art and extraordinary frescoes. On the way I meet Franco, her husband of forty-five years, who transported her from a mountain village to Morbegno, where he grew up and where they have lived ever since. Then I am in the kitchen, a space no more than four feet across and perhaps eight long that permits two people to work together, if they know each other’s rhythms and habits intimately. Lina learned to cook from her mother and grandmother in the small village of Montagna where she grew up above Sondrio, high in the mountains of the Valtellina in Lombardy. It is only about an hour from where she lives now, but light-years distant in terms of a way of life.
