Italian Marketplace

Nizza Monferrato is in the hills of the Piedmonte region of Northern Italy, about halfway between Genoa and Milan. I spent some time there one summer with Italian chef Nelly Capra, who grew up in the nearby town of Mombarruzo. We often spent our mornings scouring the nearby markets to get the best produce of the day; local fruits and vegetables that were probably on the vine earlier in the morning and cheeses so fresh you could smell the goat. In the afternoons we might go to a local winery, often in the cellar of a nearby neighbor. In the evening we would cook up a meal with our days bounty. We would eat and drink long into the night, but no matter how hard we tried, there was always more. These paintings are from the open marketplace in Nizza.