About me

I am simply one of you, with a passion for pastry-making, eager to share it with anyone who would like it and, at the same time, curious and impatient to learn plenty of new things.

I was born on 24 January 1972 in Tramonti, a small hill village on the Amalfi Coast, into a humble and very close-knit family. My parents were farm labourers and, from an early age, I always lent a hand with the work: the smell of fresh, just-milked milk is one of the most recurring memories of my youth!

A carefree childhood, rich in memories of work in the fields: the grape harvest, gathering chestnuts and hay, the fruit trees and the delights of the undergrowth.

My passion for cooking, and for sweets in particular, was practically born with me: I remember with a smile that, when I did not like what I found on coming home from school (I really could not stand legumes), I would make something for myself.

I baked my first cake at 12, in 1984, an apple cake: it was summer, my sister had been married a few months earlier, the kitchen was all mine and I was finally free to experiment.

It was in these years that I became very close to the church, and I often shared with my friends what I made at home. In 1986 I started at the Liceo Scientifico in Amalfi and, after finishing school, I enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Naples Federico II.

It is during university years that a person tempers their character, especially if you are a student living away from home and have to look after yourself. I admit it: I never held back when there was a dinner to organise!

Over the years I have learned many things, but it is above all with the arrival of the web and the birth of so many TV programmes dedicated to pastry that I became who I am: always looking for new flavours and curious to experiment, learning from the great masters while respecting tradition.

Making sweets has become for me more than a simple hobby, a real passion: there is no weekend without a cake on the table!

My father, a great admirer of my sweets, in the last years of his life was ill with Alzheimer's, so he gradually began to forget everything and not to recognise anyone; to ease his suffering I would tell him many episodes of his life in the form of fairy tales, and he always smiled, and every fairy tale always ended in sweetness with a slice of cake. He passed away in 2007.

My mother, another rock of my life, left me this year, right during the recording of Bake Off, and how it went you all saw.

Who knows what she would have said seeing me on TV…