Celebrity Chef, Award-Winning Author Maria Liberati Coming to Festa Italiana
By Thomas Hemman
Times Editor
Celebrity chef and award-winning Italian cookbook author Maria Liberati is coming to Festa Italiana and will be showcasing her culinary skills at the festival’s Cucina Showcase. She is considered one of the foremost experts on Italian cuisine and culture in the United States and has been described as the “Italian Martha Stewart” by Celebrity Society Magazine.
The 34th annual Festa runs Thursday, July 21 through Sunday, July 24 on the Summerfest grounds. The time and date for Liberati’s appearance have yet to be announced.
In February 2010, the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards selected Liberati’s book, “The Basic Art of Italian Cooking: Holidays & Special Occasions” as “Best Italian Cuisine Book in the USA.”
The book has been featured in many national publications. The Gourmand award winners are selected from more than 26,000 cookbooks by a prestigious board of culinary experts from around the world.
The book is the second written by Liberati in “The Basic Art of Italian Cooking” series. Her award-winning book contains 236 pages of recipes, menus, decorating and wine pairing tips for holidays and special occasions. However, Liberati stated “One can make any day a special day by using these recipes and menus any day of the week.”
About Maria Liberati
As a former international super model, Liberati never dreamed that she would go from a fashion diva to a domestic diva. Ironically, while jet-setting off to modeling assignments around the world, she became closer to the simplicity of life and food in the country setting of her family’s vineyard in the mountains of central Italy. There she began to experience the real tastes of food that she remembered from her childhood.
Liberati’s passion began when she was only four years old and would accompany her nonno (grandfather) on shopping trips to the Italian market in Philadelphia to buy grapes to make wine and fresh ingredients for meals. At the market, he would teach Maria how to select the fruits and vegetables that nonna, her grandmother, would use for traditional family Sunday dinner.
While at the family vineyard, Maria discovered that her great-grandparents had owned an acclaimed bakery in the south of Italy and that her great-aunt had cooked for several members of the Italian Royal Family. This sparked Maria’s dormant interest in food and cooking. She began consulting with chefs who were family friends and spent hours translating and reworking some of the old recipes left by Great-Aunt Angelina.
After meeting her fiancé in the town where her grandfather was born, Maria continued to study and work with chefs in trattorias and bed-and-breakfasts throughout Italy. While her boyfriend, a prominent Italian architect, was busy with work, during her vacations Maria would busy herself with her new-found passion: food and cooking. She soon started to receive requests to put together cooking programs in the United States. She also began writing articles on food and restaurant review columns.
Maria’s fervor and expertise have led many to look to her as an informative source on Italian cooking and Italian lifestyle. She is also a successful businesswoman and is vice president of the family-run Liberati Investment Corporation, where her brother, John, is president.
Maria is working on two more books on Italian food and culture. She is also busy developing a television show, creating a monthly lifestyle newsletter and expanding her web site (www.marialiberati.com). Her blog at http://marialiberati.com/blog2 has more than 100,000 subscribers worldwide.
