It was an early spring day in 2006 when my husband and I pulled up at Giovanni D' Angelo’s ceramics studio just outside of Polizzi Generosa  to meet Giovanni, a master local potter of a generational family of potters - dating from the mid 1800’s - to talk about glazed terracotta tiles to fill the floors of the interconnecting rooms of Palazzo Notar Nicchi:  the dilapidated house on the main street of Polizzi which we had purchased in the summer of 2004.

One morning, during my extended summer stay in Sicily this year, I left Palazzo Notar Nicchi in Polizzi to cook Sicilian food for a few hours in one of Sicily’s most contemporary shared cultural spaces, Farm Cultural Park: a space of small white washed houses opening to seven courtyards in the village of Favara, not far from Agrigento.

During the month of August, when the Sicilian summer is at its height and the evenings are long, the streets and piazzas of Polizzi Generosa come alive. Animated dramatic performances, concerts, street dancing, folk music, a lively parade and great local food fill the streets of Polizzi for a three day festival: The Festival of the Hazelnut – La Sagra delle Nocciole.

Three months ago, during my summer stay in Polizzi, I drove to Favara, a small town close to the Greek temples of Agrigento on Sicily’s Mediterranean coast. I went there to cook Sicilian food for a morning in Sicily’s most innovative meeting place, Farm Cultural Park, with the vivacious Annalisa Pompeo, the passionate founder of  Go Sicily cook, eat, explore.