How Elizabeth Minchilli Achieved a Dream Life in Italy
Photos by @eminchilli.
By Leslie Price
Elizabeth Minchilli leads food tours in Italy, and is the author of nine books. She also publishes a newsletter called Elizabeth’s Newsletter from Italy. You can find her on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
You've done a lot over your career. For people who are “meeting” you for the first time – which is, I assume, a decent amount of people [since you’ve gone viral on social media] – can you share an abbreviated history of how you've gotten to where you are?
I was originally an art historian. That's how I got to Italy as an adult, although I spent time here as a child. I left art history almost as soon as I graduated school and started writing for magazines, which was during what is now called the golden age of publishing. I had a pretty good career for about 20 years doing that. I wrote for all the major magazines and wrote six books during that time. Everything was going fine until this internet thing happened. Then, all of a sudden, I went from writing five features a month to writing like two features a year. At that point I pivoted. I'm always happy to change. I started a blog and embraced social media, which at the time was Facebook and Twitter. I took the blog very seriously, even though it wasn't making any money. I was publishing a lot of content, and that led to a book deal (my seventh book), Eating Rome. It was based on the blog. It also led to me writing the first English-language app in Italy for restaurants. And then I ended up starting a food-tour business because people were asking me what to do and where to go.
I was doing what I’ve always been doing, which is telling stories, whether it was in magazines or books, or Facebook or Twitter, or eventually Instagram, YouTube, and now TikTok. The thing that ties that all together is being able to communicate and tell stories about life here in Italy.
How long have you been living full-time in Italy?
Full-time since about ‘88, but I spent a good portion of my childhood here as well. So on and off from the early seventies.
How have you seen the reception to your content change when you're changing platforms? You have nine books, a newsletter, you've written for print magazines, and you're on all of these social media platforms. What kind of response do you get and is it different?
It is always overwhelmingly positive. But that's also because I respond to the response. When I first started my blog, it was a design blog and nobody was reading it. My first six books were about design. And so I decided to see what people were asking me about on social media. And it was more about how to cook in a tiny kitchen and the best restaurants in Rome. I made the blog more food-oriented and that was what people wanted to hear.
One of the reasons why I think people respond to you so much on TikTok is because you are a woman of a certain age who's living her best life. A clip where you share your dinner – Bugles, potato chips, blue cheese dip, and vodka on the rocks (and a beautiful view) – went viral.
Well, I’d like to tell you how that happened. I've been doing all this stuff on social media and the styles definitely change [with the platform] and also with the times. I'm usually pretty good at capturing that. The videos I was doing in 2020, I was using a filter and I looked perfect. Sophie, my daughter, and I were doing cooking videos where we had lighting and our aprons were all ironed and everything. I continued doing that on TikTok and Sophie said, “you just have to be how you are on TikTok. Don't worry about it. Just do something. Those are the most successful ones.”
That was my dinner. I have a cocktail every night, I love my potato chips, and we happened to have dip. I just thought, I'm going to try this and who cares? I haven't brushed my hair or anything. That was two months ago, I guess, and my TikTok account has grown exponentially because of that video.
And because of videos like that, now I just share my life and I don't worry too much about putting on makeup and brushing my hair.
“Enchanting” might be the right word to use when it comes to your videos, because they really paint a picture and a mood that I think people are looking for.
People I'm friends with hesitate to put some of the stuff that I put up because they're scared other people will be jealous. What I've always tried to do from the very beginning and which you so nicely called enchanting (I prefer to call engaging)... I'm very conscious of the way I take my photographs or my videos so it feels as if you're sitting at the table with me.
It’s not, for instance, an influencer walking away in a pretty dress down a beach. It's me in your face giving you a bowl of pasta. And I'm not only putting the pasta on the table, I'm providing you with the instructions or the means for how you can actually put that pasta in your mouth whether it's a recipe or the name of a restaurant. So there's usually a takeaway. And that's true with all the books I've written, whether they were interior design books or books on ceramics or cookbooks or guidebooks.
There's also a lifestyle component. As a woman in a phase of my life where I’m stressed out, trying to do too much, have young kids, etc, it’s appealing watching someone experience a pause, like a restful morning coffee or sitting outside in nature. Especially as an American.
I think you're probably right. My daughter just wrote a book called The Sweetness of Doing Nothing and that sort of sums up the entire philosophy. We do work incredibly hard. But we also take a month off in August and eat potato chips. It's the Italian way of living. It's fun and we enjoy sharing it.
How did you start doing food tours? They sell out so quickly.
When I started the blog, I wasn't getting the numbers that Deb Perelman or David Lebovitz were getting, so I didn't have advertising. I had to think of other ways to make money. One was signing a book contract, and one was starting the app, which was a very successful app. But people would come to Rome and say, “can't you just take us around?” That was not a thing back then, food tours.
When I told them I'm not a tour guide, they’d say, “we just want to go to the market with you.” The year I started doing that, a friend of mine called me up and said, “Jeff Gordinier called me from the New York Times. He’s thinking of doing an article about food tours and if they’re really a thing.” And it was a really big article. That gave me a lot of exposure at a time when I was literally the only one doing it in Rome. Now you go to Rome and it's food-tour gridlock everywhere.
A lot of people start food tours because it's not difficult to do a good food tour, to organize it and find great things to eat. It is difficult to make a connection with a public that wants to come on a food tour with you. If you don't already have a platform from which to sell it, it's very challenging. I've been working on my platform all my life. At the moment, my newsletter is probably my most powerful tool for marketing.
You've spoken about your Eat Pray Love connection in the past. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
When I was a young mother, I was part of a women's group in Rome that was anywhere from 10 to 15 women. We would get together and one person would do a presentation and one person would cook. It would be at another person's house. It was really, really great, sort of like a book club. Sometimes we would have people who were in town come to speak. And at one of those meetings, Liz [Gilbert] came.
She was just a journalist from New York who was working on this crazy book. She came and read a few chapters to us from her previous book. I became friends with her and the years she was in Rome, we did a lot and I remained her friend.
When I look at your newsletters and your videos, I always wonder how I could achieve this lifestyle for myself. It’s aspirational. I would love to live like you. Do you get that a lot?
I do get that question a lot. I got my start in print publications, and so people want to be journalists to get where I am, but that's much harder today. When I was a journalist for 15 to 20 years, I was making a really good living. We got like $3 a word. That doesn't exist anymore. There's no easy answer.
I mean, I worked really hard. I work all the time. But I love what I do. Also, it's not easy to just move to Italy anymore.
I came over here and was going to go into academia. I realized I absolutely did not want to do that. I preferred to live in Italy. Once I made that decision, and found myself a husband, I had a career here. I was flying to New York and flying to London and meeting with editors and very aggressively pitching stuff. I'm driven. But I don't think I dreamed I was going to have a house in the country, animals and a husband and kids and all of that.
It's beautiful. My last question: You have been known for your cocktails and have had a few recipes become really popular. What is your favorite cocktail right now?
Some version of a dirty martini, it can be either vodka or gin. But I do like it dirty. It can be with olives or pickles or other kinds of pickled vegetables. I also like doing them with tomato to add a little acidity and interest. Very, very dry, no vermouth.