ITALIAN WINTER – SIMPOSIO Recipes, Stories & the Season of Waiting This is not a typical winter cookbook. ITALIAN WINTER explores the cold season through food as a language of structure, preservation, and ritual. Here, cooking is not about abundance or indulgence, but about continuity—dishes shaped by calendar, repetition, and Italian winter food traditions . Winter in Italy is a time of waiting. Meals follow the rhythm of short days, religious feasts, and agricultural pause. Food becomes a way of holding memory and order together, rooted in Italian seasonal winter cooking rather than novelty. This book was shaped by observation and return—following winter kitchens, market absences, preserved ingredients, and gestures repeated year after year. A soup leads to fasting days, a pasta to Sunday ritual, a sauce to long afternoons spent indoors. ITALIAN WINTER is not : a collection of comforting dishes without context - a festive holiday cookbook - a quick guide to cold-weather meals It is a cultural monograph told through food, combining recipes, winter rituals, history, and lived observation. — Italian winter cooking is deliberate and restrained. Preservation, simmering, and patience define the season. Soups, braises, handmade pastas, and slow sauces are prepared to last, not to impress. This volume includes fully contextualized winter dishes and authentic Italian recipes , accompanied by essays on seasonal rituals, fasting and feasting, Carnival, and regional winter customs. Though rooted in tradition, the recipes are designed for modern kitchens and traditional Italian cooking practiced at home. Recipes function as cultural keys: each dish exists for a reason, in a precise moment of the year, within a rhythm of waiting rather than display. This book is for readers who love Italy beyond spectacle; for cooks who read and readers who cook. It is also for those with Italian heritage seeking reconnection through winter ritual rather than nostalgia. ITALIAN WINTER is part of SIMPOSIO , a collection of Italian travel cookbooks dedicated to Italy. Each volume is autonomous, yet incomplete on its own—chapters of a larger journey through food, season, and everyday life. A book to read, to cook from, and to keep. An invitation to wait, stir, and let time work.