It has not always been so on this Italian cooking school adventure shared with other travelers. Thanks to the magic carpet of conversation, we've tromped through the jungles of Indonesia. We've visited the Sultan of Brunei. We've toured the vineyards of France. We've seen the latest architectural wonders in Bilbao, Spain. Finding myself held captive by my garrulous companions and the stories they need to constantly tell, I feel I've been everywhere but here, the Italy I had traveled so far to savor.

I'd come for a weeklong cooking session, assuming it would be my most intimate encounter yet with the country I loved. I would not only be eating the local foods but shopping for and preparing them. But food and cooking in this crowd soon became a form of self-defense, a way to mute my companions' streaming travelogues and salvage my trip, a way to connect to the here and now.

I've always considered food to be a fundamental mode of transportation. As a child, it helped me escape the Velveeta vacuum of the suburbs. My family never had a reason to leave our native state of California. Who needed the world when we had Disneyland?

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Food was my way of visiting distant places. As soon as I could read, I began looking for recipes that sounded like they came from far, far away. Supermarket frozen tamales and canned chow mein wouldn't cut it. I searched for exotica in cookbooks and magazines and on the back of pasta packages. As soon as I could reach the top of the stove I began cooking up my discoveries. The results helped me imagine what life was like elsewhere. Cinnamon in the spaghetti sauce was a warm, friendly note from southern Italy. Gâteau was a cake from France, not a box. Rumaki said Hawaii, pfeffernuss was a comforting cookie coveted in the cold of northern Europe's holiday season.

Adulthood allowed me to indulge in my travelin' jones. I winged my way across oceans to eat dishes in the place of their origin. My motto became travel globally, eat locally. I enjoyed momos in Katmandu, chestnut crepes at the Paris flea market, Belgian frites in Brugge. I came to love Italy in great part because of the food, and I returned repeatedly over the years to Tuscany, where I found the perfect combination of melt-in-your-heart landscapes and memorable meals. When the opportunity arose to explore cooking in Umbria, a place I'd been told was like what Tuscany "used to be," I took it.

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