Skye McAlpine’s Secret Venice
Our house in Venice is hidden away in a quiet little corner of the city, perched on the edge of a canal where few boats ever drive by. The kitchen is cosy: it’s a higgledy-piggledy room with dark, ancient wooden beams, and stone floors that are long since warped and cracked from when the water floods in at high tide. At its heart is a big open fireplace, a worn marble table and a tired old cooker. It is in this kitchen that I first learned to cook. The story of how I came to live in Venice is a serendipitous one, and in that delightfully messy way that life has, it is also kind of tied up in how I came to be a cook and a writer too. I wasn’t born there, nor are my family from there; they moved to Venice when I was tiny and before I can really remember living anywhere else. The plan was to stay for a year, but then one thing led to another and some 25 years on we’re still there. For me it is home.
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