We'll fill our woven straw baskets and return to the school for active, hands-on communal cooking, where you'll learn to make perfect pasta-and how to sauce it properly, learn how to make fresh sausages, bake beautiful biscotti, grill perfect seafood, all from scratch, all starting from amazingly-fresh ingredients. You'll fill a pretty enamel colander with herbs from the school's herb garden,and as our meal starts to come together, we'll pair it with the local wines of the Salento, widely-regarded in Italy as among Italy's best for their gutsy, dry but fruit-forward appeal.

And where are we, exactly? Close your eyes and imagine the Italian 'boot'; we're in the stiletto heel, the long strip of fertile land lapped by two blue coasts, in the sunny and sensuous, baroque city of Lecce, the vibrant cultural capital of the Salentine Penisula, Come find out what Italy is like with you leave behind the crowds, queues and turnstyles. Here folks smile when they see you, ask where you're from.

But vacations at The Awaiting Table Cookery School are not only about meeting the friendly locals or seafood still dripping with the Mediterranean or even what will likely be your favourite new wines; here in Lecce you'll learn to go deeper, gain context and learn to see the ongoing local dialogues between art and food, history and language, religion and place, and how any real understanding need always be systemic.