I've been cooking Italian food my whole life — it started in my family kitchen in northern Italy, where recipes weren't written down but passed from hands to hands. No culinary school shaped me. Life did. Tradition did. Years of obsession with getting it right did.

I moved to Porto 10 years ago and founded Genuino Italiano in Matosinhos, a restaurant featured by NIT, Press Point and Time Out Porto. I spent years proving that real Italian cuisine — the kind that takes three hours, that uses guanciale not bacon, that makes pasta from scratch every single day — could find its place in Portugal.

The dish I'm most proud of? My tagliatelle al ragù bolognese. Three hours minimum, veal and beef, no shortcuts, no tomato paste. The kind that makes people go quiet for a moment after the first bite. That silence is everything.

I cook because food is the most honest way I know to connect with people. Every dinner I serve is a small piece of Italy — the real one, the one few people get to taste outside the country