The Italian gastronome

Anna Venturi, owner of cookery school Italian Secrets, tells Colette Steckel how she started a business out of her love for Italian food

It smells like summer in Anna Venturi's kitchen. In one corner of the enormous pine table that dominates the room, Kim Baretta and Suzie Hopkins, two of Anna's staff, are busy paring the skins of a dozen Sicilian oranges. Citrus smells waft through the room, mingling with the aroma of fresh coffee and sweet amaretti biscuits. You could almost forget that there is snow, ice and a blustery wind blowing outside. 'Italian cuisine is so popular here. It's easy, healthy and tastes good,' says Anna, proferring a plate piled with biscuits. 'But also I think the British have always had a love affair with Italy, whether it's the country, the art, the opera, or the food.'

Born in Milan, Anna grew up surrounded by women who loved to cook. Her father's family taught her the secrets of cooking in Bologna, while her grandmother, who hailed from a little town in Piedmont in the far north of Italy and married a Sicilian, imparted her north-south culinary wisdom and passed on a treasured folder of hand-written recipes handed down to the family through generations. 'Ever since I was a little girl, I've been intrigued by food, and I love to eat. We always cooked in my family, not professionally, but for the pleasure of experimenting. So cooking wasn't a big discovery for me. I was born with it,' says Anna.

With her vast knowledge of Italian cuisine and infectious enthusiasm for food, it's hardly surprising that Anna decided to make a business out of sharing her recipes or, as she puts it, her secrets with students at her successful Italian cookery school in Buckinghamshire. 'The recipe itself isn't really important,' remarks Anna, going into teacher mode. 'What is important is the secret behind the recipe, which could be an ingredient, the technique, or even the timing. There are a number of things that make the difference between the success or failure of a recipe.' Ah, that explains a lot.

Anna's morning themed sessions on focaccia, pizza and gnocchi, Sicilian cuisine, ossobuco and risotto, and the divine-sounding chocolate feast, are regularly fully booked, and for those with some serious entertaining or impressing to do, there are the popular four-day lessons. Anna explains that her students vary from 'ladies who lunch' to a chef who was recently booked on a course to get some ideas for his restaurant. Men have also been known to don an apron at the insistence of their wives.

Anna recalls a course she held with a group of American women who were so taken with the art of Italian cuisine that they organised a date for their partners to learn a few culinary tips. 'The husbands turned up and said that they had so much fun they wanted to invite their work colleagues to a course. So I thought to myself, from a business point of view, maybe I could make something of this.' Her corporate courses, which are a novel take on the traditional team building exercises (you get to eat your attempts after the lesson), have attracted the likes of KPMG, The Institute of Financial Services, Goldman Sachs, and Coca Cola.

It's a far cry from when Anna first started giving cookery lessons from the kitchen in her cottage. In the early 1990s, she left Italy and moved permanently to the UK to be with her second husband. Although she picked up her career where she left off, selling advertising in glossy magazines, she felt that she spent too much time working and travelling and not enough with her two teenage daughters, who joined her in the UK. 'It all got a bit much for me - the commuting and the travelling overseas - I didn't want to do it anymore,' says Anna. She quit and started considering running her own business. 'My husband's an American and his relatives in the US would always ask me to cook for them, so I thought I could make a business out of food.'

It was her eldest daughter, Letizia, who came up with the cookery school idea. At a food fair in London, mother and daughter saw a demonstration by the London-based Italian chef Carluccio. 'We were at this exhibition, watching Carluccio cooking with pasta and Letizia turns to me and says 'Mamma, if he can do it, you can do it'. And that was it. I started my cookery school.' In 1993, Anna placed an advertisement in the local press inviting small groups to learn the secrets of Italian cooking. 'I look back and think to myself, how on earth did I do that? I must have been crazy to open my home to people I didn't know and then start telling them how to make a risotto,' says Anna, laughing. 'But it worked.'

Within two years, Anna found that her cookery school had become so popular that she couldn't manage the business from home. She decided to move into a purpose-built kitchen in Buckinghamshire, complete with a small shop where she sells imported products that she uses in her classes, and a bespoke catering service. 'I felt it was time to take the next step, to turn Italian Secrets into a real business,' says Anna. 'And I always planned to expand on the cookery school anyway.' She financed the move and kitchen refurbishment from a small inheritance and money she made from her classes, and started marketing her burgeoning business, which made turnover of £200,000 last year.

Cookery holidays

Before long, Anna started exploring the possibility of taking her business further afield, into Italy. On a family trip to Sicily in 1999, she fell in love with a derelict villa above the bay of Capo D'Orlando on the north coast. The plan was to buy the villa, which she named L'Aquilone (the kite), and rebuild it as a place in the sun for her family, but Anna also saw the potential as a venue for cookery holidays. She spent almost three times as much on the refurbishment, but is delighted with the results. 'It's an absolute dream come true,' she enthuses, picking up her photo album and pointing out the stylishly decorated rooms, cavernous kitchen, infinity pool and hilltop views of the Aeolian Islands. The first students arrived at the villa for their week of cookery last autumn, with six more weeks planned this year depending on the season.

With a full calendar of cookery courses lined up for 2003 in the UK and Sicily, Anna admits that she wants to start cutting back on the number of classes she teaches. Which is why she has started ploughing her own money into developing her catering service into an upmarket business serving delectable sounding Italian dishes to party guests in London and the South. She hired Kim, a professional caterer, to manage the bookings and share the cooking, and her daughter Letizia recently joined the team as marketing manager. 'Italian catering isn't unusual these days,' remarks Anna. 'But there aren't many businesses out there doing Italian food the way we do.'

So impressive are Anna's culinary skills that she has been a guest chef on a television cookery programme and is regularly invited to do cookery demonstrations at food fairs. But she baulks at the suggestion of becoming a celebrity chef. 'I really couldn't care less about being a celebrity,' she says, waving her arm in an act of dismissal. 'This whole celebrity thing has grown out of proportion anyway. It's so obsessive and so fake.' Instead, Anna is content to share her love of fine Italian cuisine with fellow aficionados. And you can't get more genuine than that. 'I've been lucky, very lucky,' reflects Anna. 'From the moment I started my business, I've found people who were prepared to help me and encourage me. My daughter even gave up a very good job to come and work for me, and that, I think, is quite an achievement.'

For more information on Italian Secrets, visit the website at www.italiansecrets.co.uk or telephone 01494 676136.