Day 20 - 27: Cascina Papaveri, Piedmont, Italy - Pilates & Cooking!

Linda and I arrived at Cascina Papaveri for our pilates and cooking holiday last Monday!

This place is beautiful, set in Piedmont (kinda half way between Turin and Genoa) surrounded by vineyards and the Swiss Alps - its so peaceful you can hear crickets chirping while lying by the pool reading a book!

There were 2 pilates sessions a day, one generally before breakfast on the mats and then another one in the afternoon on the machines! Fingers crossed I can remember everything I have learnt in the past couple of days!!!

There were then 5 dinner cooking lessons, where we prepared four course dinners each night! My favourite would have to be the mushroom risotto, stuffed zucchini flowers and a form of tempura sardines!

Believe it or not, in this past week, I had to clean and de-bone sardines and quail (!), stuffed rabbit, made ravioli and linguine from scratch as well as making some amazing deserts!

Besides pilates, cooking and relaxing by the pool, we had a couple of excursions to the market town of Asti, Alba and a truffle hunt!

There was one amazing painted church in Alba that really took my breath away! The entire ceiling and walls were painted with frescos!

and we learnt that the Italians use dogs to smell out the truffles (whereas the French use pigs) ... although only black ones are in season at the moment!

Our time here in Piedmont has coming to an end. I'm about to make my way to the airport in order to get myself to Romania via Milan!