This article was written for the event we host at Cicio Cacio for 2019 Wellington on a Plate. I wanted to thank everyone who has enjoyed the event and hope to see them again next year.

“Casa” – home for me is a word of many meanings and places.

Casa is first of all the flat in Oriental Parade in Wellington, where I have lived for the last ten years with my wife and my two little daughters. It’s the sea, the fierce wind, the sparkling sun on one of those few incredible summer days. It’s eggs and coffee in the morning, a picnic on the beach, a cold beer overlooking the traffic on the street.

Casa is also another sea. The Mediterranean. The turquoise water of Sardinia where I used to swim and where I grow up. The long intense summer night on the terrace of our home and my mum, my dad and my brothers eating eggplants parmigiana.

Casa is Rome, the city I was born, the city of my family. A city so beautiful I always ended up hating it, the way you hate a woman too beautiful for you, too cynical, too arrogant. The city where I started cooking. My first rigatoni with broccoli eaten seating on a box in the kitchen, the 350 suppli (arancini) I had to roll every Saturday night, bad chefs, really bad, late nights tramvias, drugs, the desperate lives of metropolis, the city of my broken dreams.

Casa is Santiago de Chile, where my wife comes from. The ugliest city of the world in the most beautiful valley of the world. The Andes above the crazy traffic on the Panamericana, close to my wife’s house. The lemon tree in her little courtyard, the infinity of the sky, the nostalgia of the light. The spicy pebre, the green ripe avocados, the warm bread, the walk to the market with her mum. The smell of coriander. The street dogs.

My life was marked by a little, apparently insignificant episode. In 1999, when I was age 20, my parents left our home in Sardinia, the one with the terrace, and moved back to Rome, where my brothers and I lived already. I had been in Rome for one year at that time. I helped my parents to prepare the move on a week in September and I remember the day I went to the house because someone had to come to cut the power. My parents and all the furniture had gone already. The emptiness in the house was the same as my soul. I went to my child room and watched the warm sun coming from the window, the same sun I had watched for so many years. I cried as I had never cried before. I was lost and alone with a handful of dreams. I had no place to come back, no place to call home.

For the next ten years I went completely crazy as crazy should be any young man. Casa then became any place I felt alive. A little room in a creepy hotel full of drunks in Paris (sometimes a bench in a park in Paris). The fire burning in front of me in the desert of Mexico, eating peyote and drinking tea to keep warm. The streets of Bangkok, eating my way through it. Places and more places came through, in my desperate search for home. Finally “casa” was a little room in the Carillon Motor Inn on the top of Cuba st in Wellington, a windy, small town I did not quite like at all. Not exotic enough, not desperate enough. I spent one year in that room and left hating it. But then far away I had a postcard of it on my side table bed, I missed the wind so much. I missed my space, the greatest thing this country can give to anyone. A space you can call your own.

I came back to Wellington, to the room in the motel, I found my old job and the best woman I have ever met. Two month after we were together we started to look for an place to live. We found an advertisement on trade me for an old apartment with no picture, only saying Oriental bay. The day we walked though the door the sun shined through the windows and into the empty place, a place so full of light already, so full of love, I took Patty’s hand and we smiled to each other. We had found our love nest. Two café cooks, two immigrants, in a million dollar house. All that sea was ours.

Casa now is all those places. Now I know. It’s Sardinia, Rome, Wellington, Santiago, and any place I have been, any place I will be. I could live and be happy anywhere now. I am not lost anymore.

Casa is what you call your family, whoever and wherever they are.