🇮🇹 Read the original Italian version Io, i gialli e tutto il resto

If I had to sum up this blog in just a few words, I’d say it’s a place where crime fiction meets food — and, inevitably, life.

When I started it in 2018, I imagined a space where I could write about two passions that have always been part of my life: books and food. I believed that every good mystery novel held, alongside a puzzle waiting to be solved, its own world of aromas, flavours, tables laid for dinner and recipes capable of revealing almost as much about the characters as their actions did. I wanted to revisit those novels from a different perspective, try out the recipes I found in their pages, and share them with people who, like me, enjoy experiencing books through taste as well as words.

I was right. What I hadn’t imagined was that, as the years went by, my own life would find its way into these pages too.

Over the years, I kept reading, cooking and writing. In the meantime, many things changed: some certainties fell away, others began to take shape, and the person rereading those books today is no longer the same person who began this adventure. The blog, however, stayed. In fact, it became something more than I had ever imagined.

You won’t find literary reviews here, at least not in the traditional sense. I’ve never wanted to write them. I believe that when a book reaches a reader, it doesn’t encounter a blank slate, but a person carrying their own story, memories, wounds and hopes. That’s why the books we choose — and, above all, the way we interpret them — are shaped in part by the lives we happen to be living.

That is exactly what I try to explore in my posts. Each one begins with the meeting between a novel and a particular moment in my life. Sometimes that moment surfaces quietly; at other times, it becomes an essential part of the story. Because books don’t live in isolation on shelves: they enter into conversation with us, their meanings shift as we change, and they often help us understand what we are going through.

Crime fiction, in all its shades, remains at the heart of this blog: from classic detective fiction to noir, from police procedurals to historical mysteries. I have a particular fondness for the classic whodunit, where clues are scattered with elegance and the reader is invited to pit their wits against the detective and try to reach the solution first. It’s a game I never seem to tire of.

Alongside the books, there is food — which, in fiction, is rarely just a minor detail. A recipe, a dinner, a cup of tea or a glass of wine can help create an atmosphere, define a character and make them unexpectedly human. Think of Poirot, Maigret, Nero Wolfe or Montalbano: each carries with them a culinary world that has become part of their enduring appeal.

Whenever I can, I try to recreate recipes I come across while reading, or dishes inspired by the novels themselves. It’s my way of “tasting” a story all over again, in the most literal sense of the word.

Over the years, this blog has given me far more than I ever expected. It has taught me to slow down, to take greater care over the table, to give myself the luxury of reading without rushing, to rediscover the pleasure of cooking for the people I love and, above all, to notice those small fragments of happiness that so often slip past us unnoticed.

I still believe what I wrote at the very beginning of this adventure: happiness isn’t something we find whole. It comes to us in fragments. A good book. A recipe that turns out just right. A table shared with others. The smell of a cake fresh from the oven. A page that finds us at exactly the moment we need it.

This blog was born from those fragments, and it continues to be nourished by them every day.

My name is Angela, and welcome to my little corner devoted to crime fiction, food and the stories that, one way or another, always seem to become intertwined with life.

P.S. The photograph accompanying this page wasn’t chosen by chance. What you see is my little desk, tucked into the corner of an equally small kitchen in the home where I lived at the time. It wasn’t a study. There were no grand spaces or perfectly arranged bookshelves: just a table, a computer, some books and a corner that was entirely mine. That’s where I began writing Gialli da assaporare.

Years of books, stories, recipes, encounters and words have passed through that little desk. But more than anything, it was there that one of the good things time has left me began: this blog. Perhaps that’s why I’m so fond of this photograph. It reminds me that Gialli da assaporare started right there, almost on tiptoe, in the corner of a small kitchen.

And if you’re curious to know who I was — or at least how I chose to tell my story — when this blog was still in its early days, I’ve decided to leave my old About page here too: Me and My Personal Search for Happiness.

I didn’t want to rewrite it or delete it. By now, that too has become part of the story of Gialli da assaporare.

Angela