Reclaimed Sicilian Memories

RReclaimed Sicilian Memories is not a straight cookbook, and it’s not only a photobook. It’s a portrait of a place told in two languages: images and food.

The recipes

At the heart of Reclaimed Sicilian Memories is food — not as “content”, but as culture. The recipes in this book were gathered over years, shaped by the seasons and by the people who live and cook at Rocca delle Tre Contrade. They are the kind of dishes that belong to a place: practical, generous, and deeply local.

You’ll find 100+ recipes woven into the larger story — some simple and immediate, others slow and ceremonial. They move with the rhythm of the estate: mornings that start quietly, long lunches that stretch into the afternoon, dinners where the table becomes the centre of everything. This isn’t a glossy, trend-driven cookbook. It’s a living collection — built on ingredients, repetition, and the small decisions that make food taste like home.

What I love most is how the recipes reveal Sicily without ever needing to explain it. A sauce, a bread, a citrus note, a way of using herbs — and suddenly you’re there. In that sense, the recipes are not separate from the photographs; they are another way of describing light, landscape, and hospitality. A second language for the spirit of the place.

The house

Rocca delle Tre Contrade is not a backdrop. It’s the main character.

Reclaimed from near-ruin and restored with deep respect for what was already there, the house feels both timeless and lived-in — a place where beauty comes from use, not perfection. Stone worn smooth by decades of footsteps, plaster that holds the day’s changing light, linen that has been washed and used and folded a thousand times. Nothing tries too hard, and that is exactly the point.

What makes Tre Contrade special is the way everything is connected: architecture, landscape, and hospitality moving as one rhythm. Doors left open to the air. Rooms that stay cool in summer. A kitchen that pulls people in. A table that becomes the centre of the day. It’s a house that invites you to slow down — to notice how light falls, how silence sounds, how small rituals shape a life.

This book is, in many ways, an attempt to photograph that invisible quality — the genius loci, the spirit of place — the thing you feel before you can name it.

The Pictures.

Tre Contrade doesn’t exist in isolation. The house is part of a wider ecosystem — land, seasons, work, and community — and that ecosystem is what gives the table its meaning.

This corner of Sicily is defined by rhythms you can taste: what grows now, what is gathered, what is preserved, what returns. Ingredients aren’t “trends” here — they’re responses to weather, soil, and tradition. Citrus, herbs, olive oil, bread, wine, vegetables pulled from the season at its peak — the food feels honest because it comes from listening to the land.

And then there are the people: the hands that cook, the hands that set the table, the ones who welcome guests, the ones who know when to keep it simple and when to turn a meal into a celebration. Hospitality here isn’t a performance. It’s a form of care — a practiced generosity, repeated day after day until it becomes culture.

In the book, the photographs and recipes are both trying to do the same thing: hold that sense of place — the everyday beauty of a landscape and the human warmth that makes it feel like home.

The book

Reclaimed Sicilian Memories is not a straight cookbook, and it’s not only a photobook. It’s a portrait of a place told in two languages: images and food.

Across 400 pages, the book moves through Rocca delle Tre Contrade and the land around it — interiors, landscapes, details, the shifting seasons, and the everyday rituals of hospitality. Woven through this visual narrative are 100+ local recipes, collected over years and shaped by the rhythm of the house: what’s in season, what’s shared at the table, what returns again and again because it belongs.

The sequencing is built to feel like being there: quiet mornings, the slow build of a day, the gravity of the kitchen, the long exhale after dinner. It’s a book you can cook from — and also a book you can simply live with, open at random, and return to when you want to remember what Sicily feels like.The land, the food, the people.

The first edition is limited to 50 copies — once they’re gone, they’re gone. Pre-order is recommended.

Reclaimed Sicilian Memories — Pre-order
75,00 €