There has always been a woman named Giulia in my family, going back farther than anyone has bothered to count, but the restaurant is named for exactly one of them, and she is standing in the kitchen right now, close enough that I can hear her telling somebody -- probably Matteo -- that they have added too much salt.
My mother came to Montesorra from a town on the Ligurian coast with a focaccia recipe and very little else, married my father, and within a few years had opened a restaurant with his good sense over the accounting and her name on the wall inside, in gold letters that have needed repainting twice since. Somewhere in the middle of that, she also had eight children, of whom I am the youngest, which in this family carries roughly the same authority as being the last to arrive at a party -- everyone else has already decided how things work, and your job is mostly to learn it.
I am telling you this because every recipe in this book belongs to somebody specific, and it did not seem honest to hand you sixty dishes without also handing you the family that argues over them. My brother Matteo has opinions about dough that verge on theological. My sister Chiara can tell, by smell alone, when the olive oil has turned. My mother has never once measured anything in this book against a ruler, trusts a scale only when it agrees with her, and has been known to unplug a timer she considers overly opinionated. I have tried, throughout, to write down not just what this family does, but why, and where they quietly disagree with each other about it -- a cookbook that pretends a family cooks in perfect harmony is a cookbook lying to you about at least one thing, and usually several.
This book is arranged the way a meal here actually unfolds. Bread and dough come first, since so much of what follows depends on one or the other. Then pizza and its folded cousin, the calzone. Then the smaller dishes that open a table before anyone has committed to a full meal. Then the pastas, dry and fresh, which is where most of the real arguments in this family happen. Then rice, then the mains, then the vegetables this kitchen has never once treated as an afterthought. And finally the sweets, which nobody here has ever needed convincing to make room for.
Every recipe includes a section we call Quando Va Storto -- when it goes wrong -- because a recipe that only describes success has never struck me as a finished recipe. Cooking, in my experience, is mostly the accumulation of small, specific mistakes, made once and then not made again, and it seemed dishonest to leave that part out simply because it's less flattering than the photograph beside it.
Wherever you're reading this, whatever kitchen you're standing in, I hope some of what follows works on the first try, and that the parts which don't teach you something anyway. That has mostly been how it's gone here too.
-- Alessandro