Love Italy and Italian food? If you’re traveling to Italy, take time to learn how to make pizza at a school like La Tavola Marche Agriturismo & Cooking School. Photo credit: La Tavola Marche Agriturismo & Cooking School.

Victoria Cawthorne wrote this guest post about trying local cuisine and pizza making in Italy.

Wherever you travel in the world, you should do your best to absorb as much as you can about the local culture, and naturally this includes sampling the local cuisine.

Take pizza for example – you may think that you make a pretty mean pizza, or that your local takeaway pizza store delivers the very best in authentic Italian pizza, but you may change your mind when you travel to Italy!

Many people that have visited will tell you that an authentic Italian pizza tastes very different to those found in restaurants and takeaways here, but when you book on package holidays to Italy with cheap companies like Jet2holidays you could go one better than just tasting the local pizzas. Instead, why not take the time to learn how to make the dishes for yourself?

Italy has a number of residential cookery schools to choose from, and by the time you leave you could be making pizza like an Italian master!

Wood Fired Pizza from Scratch & Cooking Class in Italy. Video courtesy of La Tavola Marche Agriturismo & Cooking School.

The Origins of Pizza

Though there are millions of people all over the world that regularly sit down to enjoy a pizza, few ever think about how the dish came into being. Although we tend to associate pizza with Italy, this is not necessary where the idea originated from.

People all around the Middle East, the ancient Greeks and even the ancient Babylonians used to eat flatbread topped with things like olives and spices. As far as Italy is concerned, Naples is the place that takes pride in claiming the pizza as their own, when a dish was created that was presented to visiting royalty.

A traditional flatbread was topped with foods that would symbolize the colors of the region of Naples, these were the red of the tomato, the green of the basil and the white of the mozzarella cheese. The reaction of the visiting royalty ensured that the dish was a success and soon the greater population were cooking their own variations of the dish.

A Well-Traveled Dish

By the early 1900s, the dish had crossed the Atlantic with the Italian immigrants into America and the dish soon became a favorite with the general population. Pizza is now one of the most recognizable foods available today. So why not learn how to make it the way the Italians do, by taking a residential course at one of their amazing cookery schools. Cheap flights to Italy are available online, so pack your apron, brush up on your herbs and spices and take your place on a holiday with a difference!

A teaspoon of Mother’s Little Helper, an organic herbal tea by DAVIDsTEA. Photo credit: TravelingGreener.com.

“If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are too heated, it will cool you. If you are depressed, it will cheer you. If you are excited, it will calm you.” William E. Gladstone.

We always make time for tea in our travels.

Wherever we’re traveling, we pack and make our own tea. And we’re always tea questing, tasting tea at local tea houses and shops.

On a recent journey to Toronto, we discovered Canadian tea brand, DAVIDsTEA, which has tea shops across Canada and U.S.A and online shopping. The Montreal-based company says it travels the world sourcing premium loose leaf teas and creating exclusive blends.

Four DAVIDsTEA teas: 1.(top left) Paradise Found; 2.(top right) Mother’s Little Helper; 3.(bottom left) Forever Nuts and 4. (bottom right) Day Dreamer. Photo credits: TravelingGreener.com.

DAVIDsTEA sells black tea, green tea, herbal tea, rooibos, white tea, maté, pu’erh tea, oolong tea and ayurvedic tea.  We fancy the fresh, Scandinavian design feel in the shops which feature a wide range of tea accessories from teapots, teamakers and tea sets to infusers and sweeteners.

We love the results of DAVIDsTEA’s questing, namely Paradise Found (no. 1 above), a fruity black and green tea. This medium caffeine tea is blended with hibiscus blossoms, apple, orange peel, candied mango bits, safflower and cornflower blossoms.

For a relaxing end-of-day tea, we’re drinking Mother’s Little Helper, a herbal tea. This caffeine-free tea’s ingredients include organic peppermint, lemongrass, rosehips, hibiscus, chamomile, valerian root and cornflowers.