Lauren Birmingham: author of It’s A Dream Place cooking-vacations.com -300

The Amalfi Coast is a dream place, and when I saw it for the first time, something shifted in me.  I knew I had to live there.   -Lauren Birmingham Born into an Italian-American family of great chefs, Lauren Birmingham has an innate love of food and family.   As a child growing up in Cranston, Rhode Island, she spent hours swinging in a hammock under a cherry tree,  reading the classics.  This fascination with reading, combined with her passion for travel, inspired Lauren to explore Europe as an adult.  On a trip to Italy’s Amalfi Coast, she came around a corner in her Fiat 500 and couldn’t believe her eyes.   “Thecolor of the houses built into the mountains was like confetti.  They were the prettiest pink, blue, and yellow, and the color of the Tyrrhenian Sea was an unmatchable shade of blue. It’s a magical place, unlike any I’d ever seen in my life.”  From that moment, Lauren came back to Positano as often as she could,  running her PR business from a rented studio while developing her Cooking Vacations Italy culinary tour company.   cooking-vacations.com.  Along the way, she met and married an Italian race car driver named Rino Piscitelli.  At the top of her career,  she decided to write a cookbook that would include the recipes of 5-star Michelin Chef Andrea Migliaccio and become a 360-page labor of love.  Says Lauren:  “ It took years to travel around the Amalfi Coast and Capri, interviewing in Italian and then translating into English, plus the recipes had to be translated from metric to imperial.”  Aptly named It’s A Dream Place: Stories & Recipes of Food, Love & the Amalfi Coast, this interview with Lauren will set your compass toward the next flight to Italy!   #amalficoast #italy #food #michelinchef