There's a specific kind of person in everyone's life who has been completely ruined by Italy. They went once, maybe twice, and now they talk about it constantly. They cook pasta from scratch. They have opinions about olive oil. They've already started planning the next trip. If you're trying to buy a gift for this person, you're in luck — Italy gives you a lot to work with.
Here's exactly what to buy someone who loves Italy, from the genuinely beautiful to the practically perfect.
A Watercolour Print of Their Favourite Italian Place
The gift that will stop them in their tracks. Not a photograph — a watercolour. There's something about the way watercolour captures Italian light — that particular warmth, the haze over the hills, the blur of bougainvillea against white walls — that a photograph simply can't replicate. It looks like a memory rather than a record.
At Sundays In Tuscany we make watercolour destination prints of the places people love most: Tuscany, Positano, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, Florence, Rome, Lake Como, Venice, the Greek islands and more. Each print is made to order on premium fine art paper — A4 from £17.99, A3 from £36.99 — with free UK shipping. The effect when it goes up on a wall is genuinely remarkable.
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An Italian Cookbook Worth Keeping
Not just any cookbook — the one that becomes a household reference, dog-eared and olive-oil-splattered over years of use.
The Silver Spoon is the definitive Italian cookbook, a thousand-page compendium of regional cooking that every serious cook should own. Marcella Hazan's
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is perhaps the greatest Italian cookbook ever written. For something more personal, Stanley Tucci's
Taste is a love letter to Italian food that reads as beautifully as it cooks.
A Moka Pot and Good Italian Coffee
The Bialetti Moka Express is one of the great objects of Italian design — a stovetop espresso maker unchanged since 1933 that makes better coffee than most machines costing ten times the price. Pair it with a bag of Illy or Lavazza ground coffee and you've given someone a morning ritual they'll use every day. The three-cup version is £25-30; worth every penny.
Italian Ceramics
The hand-painted ceramics of southern Italy — the lemon-yellow pottery of Positano, the bold colours of Sicilian majolica, the intricate painted plates of Vietri sul Mare — are among the most beautiful objects Italy produces. A set of hand-painted pasta bowls or a painted espresso cup brings Italy into their kitchen every single day.
A Great Book About Italy
Frances Mayes'
Under the Tuscan Sun sent a generation of people to Tuscany and remains one of the most pleasurable reads about Italian life. Tim Parks'
Italian Neighbours is deeply funny and affectionate. And Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels — start with
My Brilliant Friend — are arguably the greatest Italian fiction of the past century.
A Gallery Wall Starter Set
For someone who has visited more than one Italian destination — which is almost everyone who's been once — the real gift is the start of a gallery wall. Three prints of three different places: the town where they had the best meal, the coastline they walked for hours, the city they keep going back to. Wrapped together, it transforms a wall rather than just decorating it.
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