I’ve been involved in theater for fifteen years, and I thrive on questioning meaning, deconstructing thinking and creating together. When my company suffered a massive blow from the Dutch subsidy system, after a period of frustration and darkness, something opened up. And I gave that something some space, and followed an intuition to build something next to that broken system, to develop something in a different place that does not dictate what it is exactly.

So here I am, and now my days go a little something like this:

07.04 open eyes, feel a cat nibble, hear birds chirp, think of food, always always ‘mangiare’, prep breakfast. Wake the tiny one - a six year old boy who speaks better Italian than I do - get the kid sort of sorted - drive down the hill in the new old fiat panda, hand the kid over to a yellow school bus. This ‘pulmino’ driven by an Brazilian Italian man who next to being the schoolbus driver is running a communal pool alongside coffee and aperitivo bar, he is also an e-bike rental business owner and a hike guide - but back to the morning: back in the panda, stop at the local bar, enter, dead silence arrives, six older men stop speaking, and I want to shout ‘ma ragazzi, siamo nel duemilaventisei’ but I m still shy shouting Italian so I just stare back at them - stay calm, order a cafe for 1,20 that I forgot to bring cash - so I have to remember tomorrow. Chat with the owner who asks if I finished building the green house for which his suns equalised the ground floor with a ‘trattore’ - and I did not finish the greenhouse but I did start by puzzling the frame together. Get back in the panda, go home. Prep another coffee, take the coffee on a motivational stroll around the vegetable patch, collect fresh chamomile, wonder how I ever get full production mode of flowers on. Follow that intuition. Change into construction clothes, get a text from the bee mentor, he is coming ‘adesso’ - now, put the bee suit over construction clothes. Take the smoker, boots and the ‘leva’ (a very handy bee hive tool). Go down the slope. Collect the honeyboxes. Sweat. Learn. Walk back up. Take the bee suit off. Answer the phone, explain to the driver the address of the farmhouse in Italian. Would they bring the hard stone sink or the shower box? Think about the consequences of this dropoff for the construction schedule. Make a coffee, it is 11.00 eat a slice of leftover pizza. See an email incoming for a theater production. Drop the beekeeper suit. Take the computer, sit outside. Write the email. Try to pay the bill for the kid’s school menu tokens. Check the calendar, see friends are coming, realise there is no hot water because the fire has been off for two days. Collect some cardboard and dry wood that is lying around. Heat the wood driven boiler. 12.30. Hungry but construction work did not start. So make a prep round, collect a drill, a container, and plaster tools. Walk to the writers cabin that is in full construction mode. Find materials, sand the surface. Thoughts on the beauty of construction and deconstruction of a house, of life. Break it down and build it back up in a different way. Just different, on top of that that was. Have left over fresh pasta lunch semi heated, while eating - water plants that are on the shady side of the house. Walk back to the cabin, mix the microcement, apply layers, wonder off, find the flow, work a bit harder, after three o’clock start to try to wrap up, wash materials, ignore the kid pick up timer twice, so no shower, step in the panda, 15.50 collect the kid, drive up the hill again, wash all construction materials, reorganise kids treasures, think of food, make snacks, take the shower, go to the veg patch, take some out of the ground, get distracted and rework the garden, back to the kitsch’, prep the food, find a sunny spot out, read three books with the kid, put it to bed, get the kitchen sorted, get called back in by the tiny one because there is a grasshopper in the klamboe (mosquito net). 21.20 connect the water hose, water the plants from the veg patch, bind freshly grown beans, think on why something is growing and other things not, life, right there. Open the computer with dramatic sunset, write, work, think, find words, text a friend, see a fire fly, read two pages in a book, lights out.

….

It is just ‘a life’ on an old farmhouse on a quiet Italian hillside. I haven’t been dreaming of days like these. But now they are here. And I unravel them with joy. Learning new skills. Playing new roles, like a beekeeper, construction manager, a flower farmer, and a host to artists. These roles are, of course, wonderful, but they’re also frustrating and challenging, because I’m a beginner, and offcourse Italian bureaucracy is no joke. But above all, it’s so refreshing to learn so much, it just shows that I don’t know shit. On top of that, I’m still able to create theater while commuting back and forth to the Netherlands.

In Prunetto, together with my partner Yannick Noomen, I’m building an artists’ agriturismo, what that will be exactly, we’ll find out in the coming years. Slowly, the doors of Cascina Prunetto are opening. We are proud and excited and nowhere close to finishing. Nevertheless, this summer we are hosting a wood workshop (fully booked), a brunch with a befriended chef, a pizza party and a first art residency (fully booked). Looking tremendously forward to all these first timers.

Oh, and.

There is a website www.cascinaprunetto.com

Ciao Anne Maike

So what did we do? Our construction planning starts with guestroom number one, nothing as great as using a sledge hammer, it’s liberating and results are quick. Old fixtures are removed and we bring the broken tiles to the isola ecologica. Once empty, we are ready to rebuild; it’s October, and we find out that we have more than twenty walnut trees that produce a lot of walnuts that need to be collected (done) and processed into oil (still not done). In the two months that pass the walls are plastered, the floor of the bathroom is tiled with re-used marble tiles, Yannick rewires the tubes, and while continuing the work we get distracted by cold temperatures. We get snowed in for quite a few times. It is the prettiest sight where all is white, noise gets absorbed and the road is covered in centimetres of white fluff. Our central heating system uses so much wood we have to find wood over and over again. So we ask around, a truck comes, drops the logs and you puzzle them into the shed. Every time there is a load off, I am so impressed with the amount of wood that each time I say, wow this time we really have enough. The last batch came late March. And now the central heating system is just turned off because of spring temperatures. We only need it for hot showers and hot water, but now I think we don’t have enough wood to make it into the summer. But hey, let’s see.

So back to construction progress, we wanted to start on building the bathroom washing block and microcement the walls, but Italian bureaucracy demands time: it turns out that in order to keep the agriturismo status that the buildings have, we need an official farmer status. So I do research on how to become a farmer, and now I am in farming school for two days a week and it means fewer days of work on the construction front. I also have to visit the farming union many times, I have to come up with a farming plan, which is not only challenging because I never farmed before: since we don’t have acres of agricultural land, we don’t check the farming boxes easily and the union keeps sending me back home. So I keep adjusting my farming plan and last February the union gave me a green light to start a small edible flower farm :) So now I have to learn how to grow snackable colourful goodies, learn how to dry them and make a collab with a restaurant or a pastry shop. And a good friend for the flowers are bees. So now I will have to learn how to be a beekeeper. So I took a bee course. In these months we learn that instead of checking boxes off the list, more boxes to check were added.

We see spring coming, and it is so cliché but really it’s fascinating: birds start to sing from early in the morning, plants that seemed dead sprout, little insects flying around. The green fingers that I’m starting to grow get real itchy. To get a vegetable garden started, we have to start NOW. That means creating garden beds, a seedling station and building a fence around it to protect the greens from deer, wild boars, and hares. Together with friends and with help from our neighbours we lift rocks and bags of soil, and we build four cold beds, with the beauty of limestone that we find. We fill other no-dig beds with more mulch, and we plant onions, garlic, asparagus and potatoes. And we get distracted from this distraction because we learn that on the other side of the road there is an overgrown ruin that is ours, so we dive in with cutters and saws to see if we can liberate some of the stone walls. And after cleaning out one well, and a pile of garden scrap later, we decide that it is something for next year.

And then the bees arrive. Before I finished the course eight hives are brought by beekeeper Simona. The bees are my new obsession, hang out with me and I will only be dropping bee facts and figures because it is awesome and mindblowing and captivating. A bee colony is a female-run society, these cooperative troopers show many interesting ways of being. Ok so the bees arrive, and the next day when I return from my first field trip from farming school I hear them when I enter the courtyard. They form a zooming monster group and are drinking from a little water pool. Oh NO. I messed up the first day as a beekeeper. I did not keep them around their hive. What if they keep coming to this little water source? I run to my beekeeping book, text the beekeeper and ask the internet. Turns out the beautiful warm days and their hard work made them thirsty and they all move together to the closest water. So I cover the little water pool and create water sources next to the hives and hope for the best. And it gets better and they learn where to drink. And I make fresh pasta to wrap up that day.

It’s days like these that motor a stream of questions, what am I doing? I have never worked on land before. How do I know where to start? The material to build a big greenhouse is standing next to the road for almost a month and I still don’t see days coming where I can make space to build it. If you can’t even put together the greenhouse, how are you gonna grow flowers? And if you are able to grow flowers, who will buy them? And how do I create a sustainable water irrigation system for that greenhouse? How does something like a little flower farm become profitable? Run by someone who is driven by telling stories, it doesn’t seem so clear to me? But it is me! And at that point the opening of our artist residency seems far away. Why are we not going faster? Those rambling questions might be a good way to circle back to the type of reflection I started with.

It’s not that I don’t see that we make progress. Things did get done: the first room now has an entirely new bathroom, and the floor is tiled, microcement layers and a PU coating have been put on the walls, walls are painted, and the plinths have been put in, and the sliding door is hanging, and the lights are working. And on a cute and a bit confrontational note, six-year-old Miró speaks better Italian than I do. But besides this practical reflection I ask myself, perhaps impatiently: where in the process are we? What progress did we really make?

And than I take a breath, and tap into my new Italian-ness. Thinking, a year ago I was not even sure we would get the house. So where are we? I lift my shoulders and say the Italian ‘boh’. What can I say? We are on the way. Yes, we started so much and finished nearly nothing. And that is the beauty of it. Our dreams got bigger. Our vision widened. Our skills got extended big time. Our community came closer. We are right in the middle of it.

Will it be finished before summer? No, probably not. But ‘boh’. Maybe we could open up anyway. We could just start, unpolished and explorative. Let’s see. We will invite artists who are in need of a space to create something this summer. Let’s try. Let’s share. Let’s throw a little opening party on the 15th of August. Let’s meet each other. Let’s eat together. I will do some pasta :) and perhaps make cocktails with honey. Let me know if you want to be part of it in any way.

Ciao, Anne Maike

My latest fun bee fact is a bit cruel. It’s about the male bee, a drone. A male grows from an unfertilized egg. Its sole real purpose is to mate with a new queen. So every day around noon it flies out of the hive, and if there is a new queen around they mate, she fills up her body with sperm from as many males as there are around. Her ‘spermatheek’ from this one ‘brideflight’ is sufficient for her whole five queen-bee years. But back to those male bees, they get to live with the colony until late summer. And then at the point where the cooperative group prepares for winter, bee production slows down, honey gets sealed, the worker bees push the males out and either let them starve from the cold or collectively slaughter the male bees before winter falls (if you would only remember this bee fact for the beautiful word ‘darrenslacht’). A smaller community is needed for wintry cold days and male bees don’t contribute. So a group of females forms a winter cluster, by vibrating all together they create a warm temperature to collectively survive the cold. Say! What! Bees 🐝 This is a play in itself right?

First I took a shot at killing bamboo. The grandfather of the previous owner got a little bamboo gift and put it on the land. The result after a good 100 years is a sturdy bamboo forest ready to take over the land across the road. So I started working, went in with a saw and a good plant cutter. I met a grand thorn plant living with the bamboo and started sweating. Two days and a great number of scratches later, the land underneath the bamboo became visible again. I guess I need to keep cutting the bamboo stems over the coming years to win the battle completely. I discovered trees under the bamboo, and while trying to identify them I realised (again) that I am still lacking so much knowledge – I just don’t know what trees, plants and bushes grow on the terrain. It is like a real relationship: getting to know takes time, slowly the history and the language unfolds.

I picked up my friend Han from the train station - Han, lover of words and nature, if I had to give him two labels, arrived with a little rucksack, full of books, a laptop and a mind full of garden ideas. Whenever Han is around he occupies the writer’s cabin, sometimes alone, sometimes with Kyrian, who also joined a few days later this time. Always running up the hill, inhaling the forest and coming down with red cheeks and a small nature observation. This time he shared seeing large numbers of frogspawn gathered in pools of mud. “Can you imagine the concert they will give this summer when they are all grown.”

“Ready to plaster a wall.” That is my good friend Annelinde. Actress in our latest Nineties production, and my friend with whom I co-parented when living in Rotterdam, but mostly my philosophical life partner. Always in the mood for analysing the searching creature that we are. She came with her family for a short co-living, and she wouldn’t be Annelinde if she didn’t do some construction work. Together with her sister they attacked the walls in the indoor area. I watched over little Miró and Uma – who dressed up as Batman and some dino – running up and down the hill a million times. Yannick continued on a guest bathroom: coating the walls and puzzling together the tubes and construction of the shower and sink. It was wondrous to see how this full house moved and worked together in little islands. A superorganism moving with the pace of the land.

The vegetable garden-to-be got a real kick-start. Seeds were germinated, and the first bulbs of garlic and onion were planted in freshly mulched earth. We started lifting stones to build a small greenhouse. The neighbours saw our work and gave us a hand. Giorgio dusted off his tractor to help out. We collected limestones from around the land, lifted them onto the tractor, and he drove them to the land behind the guest rooms. Three open greenhouse areas for lettuce, carrots and radish were built. We made holes in the moist clay ground with a ground drill to anchor a fence around the area, because we would love to stop animals like hares, wild boars and deer from snacking on all our greens.

We also discovered that we have more land down the road than we thought. Our neighbour Ada is sure of it. We checked it, and indeed the ruin, totally overgrown with thorns and vines, is ours. So we dove into this heap of dead wood and wobbly walls, cutting and working our way through. We found a lot of trash and of course treasures like old beer glasses, parts of a fence, a beautiful chestnut wood plank - but mostly dead wood and rubbish. We tried the chainsaw my dad rarely used, understood that cleaning up the mess you make takes most of the time, so we sat for a while in the mess we’d made and left the ruin on our list of things to do when you find yourself at a loose end.

In order to keep doing what is actually on our roughly scheduled schedule - to open an agriturismo where we host artists and other lovers of nature and life - I have to become a farmer. Fast. Long story. So I started farming school, entirely in Italian. It is partly online, and for twelve hours a week I learn about pesticides, agricultural rules, water management, fertilisation and animal health. It is boring at times, but just as often energising. I’m learning! Playing the role of student in all its forms. I look forward to the field trips, observing and chatting with other young farmers.

So what will I farm? Still very much under construction – but a design for an edible flower farm is on the way. Dreams of colourful flowers, a roadside stand and a picking garden fill my sketchbook. And since this week - to keep the learning going - I’m in bee school too. Bees in combination with the flower fields will be a great collaboration. So chop chop. Sometimes words follow dreams: at the beginning of April, eight bee families are coming. I’m dead nervous - what a great responsibility, taking care of bee families. Recognising a queen, coming to understand the happiness of a bee family. This co-working superorganism that I have to observe, monitor and help. Hoping it will go just as naturally as my co-working friends. Thankfully beekeeper Simona will help me, he is a young beekeeper from the neighbourhood who has taken me under his bee-wing to get a grip on this new adventure. I asked him about his life - he also manages 11 hectares of young hazelnuts, looks really calm and is always on the move working really hard. Do you get stressed, I ask? With old this land and bees asking so much of you? “No,” he says, “I work hard, but I don’t run - you’ll lose life.” And I think of the running me, that I know really well, and the different pace I’m practising now. The pace of the countryside is guiding me. Because at times I can get totally overwhelmed by all of it. Besides running a theater company, now running an artist residency and an edible flower farm. Who did I become? And at the same time, those thoughts about becoming dissolve into a feeling of belonging. In this place, a quiet place dictated by the seasons and the community. I just have to get to know them, and my place in it will emerge.

This weekend I dipped into Genova again. Han and I took the train, watched not the best theatre and got to know the city. We strolled the tiny streets filled with life, everyone on the lookout for something. We talked about growing (older), chasing dreams and learning new things - and got high on life. Grazie mile, messy city. I took this burst of city energy back to the mountainside.

Got myself a mimosa for Women’s Day. The prettiest yellow flower, covering Italy’s countryside in spring, thriving in harsh conditions. The bloom of this flower testifies to women’s sensitive nature, while their hardiness speaks to female fortitude: “It’s a collective flower, with all those little flowers put together.”

The house is quiet again. Even Yannick is back in Holland to play our last Artificial By Nature show. So I’m solo on the mountainside for a few days. Besides trying to stay calm, I get to make a construction schedule for the next wave of hands and friends arriving: planning how to build a concrete block countertop for a kitchen, strip down a second bathroom, repainting old fences and windows, find wood for a sliding door, design a bar for the living room and leave space for all the unexpected.

So far this note, on the lasagne of life on the hillside.

Ciao, Anne Maike

P.S. If you want to contribute – dream, construct, or think with us – please make noise in my inbox. There are empty rooms in May and perhaps in June.

P.P.S. this note has no recipe, but I did make a lot of pasta, I even got interviewed by Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf on my pasta nerdness. The talk was about my deep love for fresh pasta, story telling, the agileness of recipes and building a community through food made by your own hands.

These last weeks my skill set expanded big time. I learned by doing, by watching construction YouTube videos and by calling my dad many times.

We are still working on guestroom number one out of three. We stripped down the whole room. Including old tiles and all sanitary items. Right now we are puzzling the room back together.

In day to day construction life it means that we have a plan but most of the time one thing leads to another unforeseen. To prep the tiling of the floor we needed to take the tiles from downstairs to the first floor, but since it freezes all the time, a lot of tiles were frozen together, so a bucket of warm water and a chisel and of we went..in a train of frozen fingers we got them all up, once up we had to face the fact that these vintage tiles are thicker than the ones we removed, which means that the door wouldn’t be able to open after we would have put the tiles plus a layer of adhesive in. So the door needs to be shortened. So the door needs to be lifted out of its hinges. So we learn how to do that.

The door can be shortened with a milling cutter, neither Sanne - who helped me big time last week- nor me, had used an electric milling cutter before. I channel my carpenter grandpa - and call my dad. “Just make sure there is no metal, turn the knob in its lowest position and let the cutter do the work” he tells us on the phone. So I chop off the metal hardware part of the door with the grinding tool, Sanne takes the cutter to hand and just like that the door is shortened. “Don’t forget to put some primer on the door because after the cutting it is unprotected.” My dad texts me a minute after the cutting is done. But before we can prime, we need to sand the door and fill some holes with filler that needs to dry for four hours. But due to the cold, drying will take longer. So we use a small electric heater that is standing in the writers cabin where Natasha is staying. I knock on her door while she is putting her construction clothes on. I did not know Natasha before I picked her up in Genova. By the idea of woofing - she stays for free and helps around - she’s spending a week with us. A fellow searching human in need for a break from her day to day life as a tattoo artist and dj in Rotterdam. On her first construction day she cleaned out the whole room and started painting the room in this coral orange red.

But back to the tiles. Where does one start, tiling in a room where not one wall is straight? Sanne started to measure and remeasure to line out the floor. And after lunch the first adhesive is mixed and the tiling puzzle begins. Sanne is channeling her uncle in law, who paves roads for a living ‘een straten maker’. We are having a meeting every hour on what is a straight line or not. This way the joy of making a neat pattern continues for a few days.

And so we form a family of four for a little week. Me and Sanne en Natasha and Miró. Miró just loves guests. Asking them to put him to bed. And teaching them how to make pasta. So the pasta virus is still spreading. This last week we made ‘anelli’ rings with just butter and parmesan. Sides for vitamines. And I want to rave about the fennel malloredus with fried capers that we made. We sautéed the fennel for a long time, fried the capers, added some lemon zest, parmesan on top. And off you go.

Miró goes to judo two times a week in the pretty village of Millesimo. It has a cute river and a wobbly bridge above it, a nice street with a few bars, the best foccacia bakery, a vegetable shop and a specialty’s shop with cheese wine and bread. Like integrale bread!!! My Dutchness came up and I bought two ‘volkoren’ breads and stashed the freezer. Millesimo has a medieval themed restaurant where they make the beste home made pizza with typo o flower, crispy and light. When ordering a drink at the local bar next to the restaurant I shortly chit chat with other judo parents. And while trying to come up with Italian words I’m zooming out, how did this become my life?

Not a long time to zoom out, cause once we are home we have a heater to fill with wood, the guests are leaving and the snow is coming again. Me and Miró are a team, and he is starting to correct my Italian accent, which means he just laughs at me when I say for example ‘caldo’ (warm) with a K and an open O on the end, ‘è caldo mama cosi..’ And his accent really is softer, so I try to learn that too.

On Monday night I don’t have to use my Italian because there is a driver from Lithuania standing in front of the cascina. I greet him with joy cause he is delivering a wooden hottub. But he is in another mood. He is screaming at me with a german accent ‘collega kommen’. ‘It is just me’ I say, ‘I emailed and called the hottub company’ I say to explain them that ‘tonight I’m alone and delivering is not the best idea’. He continues in Lithuanian swearwords. After an hour where we both don’t know what to do because offcourse the hottub company doesn’t answer any of our calls or mails, I call Oscar, a local contractor that we just got to know and who is thé friendliest Italian ever, Oscar is getting his rib checked at the hospital after constructing work and immediately sends his just as sweet brother. He comes with a ‘trattore’, everybody’s mood switches to cooperative working. And now there is a hottub on our cascina yard. We will buy Oscar and his brother a drink at the local bar where there is a pasta party this Saturday. Next week when Yannick arrives after playing our performance ‘Artificial by Nature’ many times this month we will put that hottub in chilling modus!Being snowed in gave Miró a day free from school, a knee high snow walk and the making of a snowman.

I’m slowly continuing the constructing work. Yesterday I grouted the tiles, felt the joy of little steps, fill the holes, sponge, a little pasta leftover lunch in the sun, seeing snow melt, sponge again and watch the progress. I am starting to realize this is it. Learning, slowly, living.

Today I start agriculture school in Turin. Completely in Italian, I’m a little nervous. But excited. Knowledge is incoming.

Ciao my friends who follow my scribbles.

À la prossima

Anne Maike

Ps. I am thinking of organising a pasta retreat (What about two fresh, handmade pastas per day, add a day of going to a local market/winery and I guess we have a schedule: 5 nights, 4 days of making 8 pastas in total ??) please email me if you are up for it or have idea’s or questions.

Ps.II. For the OG pasta lessons don’t forget to go to Scuola di Arte Culinario Cordon Bleu in Firenze for a pasta lab.

I wanted to write some words to wrap up 2025, how things went from officially saying goodbye to the way we worked with our theater company up until migrating to Italy. But actually it feels like I’m still in the middle of this big change. So this is not a wrapping-up substack. But just a tiny slice of these past few weeks.

The neighbour asked why I was making rectangular shaped things alongside the road. I explained my vegetable garden dream. She frowned. I explained her the ‘lasagna’ I plannend on putting there: cardboard, pieces of wood, walnut shells, ash from the wood stove, coffee grinds, egg’s, compost, leaves and some mest and grass as a cover. Her eyes did become a bit softer. Che lavoro, she said. What a work. The snow added a natural extra layer and I slowly continued working. And now, four big garden beds are ready for a wintery season of rotting and fermenting. Let’s see what will start to live out there. The 4 vegetable garden pieces-to-be are just above the house alongside the road. I was inspired by this whole no-dig garden idea, you just layer out a mulch lasagna and some earth on whatever ground, and without digging you can start to grow stuff, but when I saw the rocks peeping out of the clay ground, I did decide to work the land for a centimeter or ten, just to get the rocks out. And then I decided to level most of the land, it was nice, I got sweaty, it took many hours, but I did get a feeling of the land.

We heard ‘che lavoro’ may times this month, even when I go to the family ran hardware store (where you would think the word work is not up for any discussion) they say - when I show them the big vintage marble tiles that we want to use for the bathroom of the guestrooms: ‘che lavoro’. Or when the plumber comes to help bend the pipes and he sees us running with egaline to level out the floor: ‘che lavoro’. The old owner came by, we sat in the what used to be his restaurant but now is our living room. He gave us nectar, we gave him our walnut oil. He took photos. He walked towards every corner. Nodded. I think we both got a mix of feelings. The new and the old, I’m happy they meet in a friendly way. And when he left walking out of the kitchen that we repainted and cleaned, he said ‘che lavoro’.

As the ‘lavoro’ echoes I notice that to me it does not resonate as work. The things we do here feel like a new discovery of life. We learn every day. We unfold the land, the house, the community. With seasons directly under our feet. We finally understood how to really heat our wood stove properly to beat that watery coldness of the fresh layer of snow. We learned how to put snow chains on and off the car to get off the hill. Last ten days the snow just came and came. We were IN the clouds for many days.

It was a true beauty. In the beginning of the snowy days we kept on constructing, we learned how to build bathroom furniture out of aerated concrete blocks. It is fun. And I’m already looking forward to the next aerated block project. (pff what a word, aerated, in Dutch we say ‘cellenbeton blokken’ and in the hardware store we had to say the words ‘blocchi di calcestruzzo cellulare’). The last days of snow we surrendered with love for this time of year, we stopped the work and went full in Christmas mode. Vin Brule. More snow. More pasta. Natale was glowing with the warmth of our friends.

Also, we got a step further in the Italian paperwork jungle, some real handy doors opened, and although our lists are still marked with red question marks, it does look like I’m starting a professional farmers course in February (SAY WHAT???) and we are working on an international co-productions application with a theater in Lviv Ukraine, for our new theater piece by our company Nineties: Untitled, 2026 - feminine frequencies. All these things. It is a precious cocktail of the old and the new.

To calm our minds we cook. We made home made pizza and fresh pasta as much as we could. Our favourite pizza topping recipe is wintery warm: grilled zucchini, apple capers, mozzarella and thinly sliced fennel.

My go to pasta recipe, to share my love for making pasta with your own hands is as simple as it is good. Malloredus with tomato sauce, a sauce that is almost a puttanesca.

To serve 6, use 500 grams of Semolina di Grano Duro Rimachinata & 220 ml of water, sift the flour, make a well, add the water, little by little scoop it in with a fork, use your hands, knead the bowl until completely soft and elastic. Let it rest a little (at least 20 min) while making the sauce. Finely chop a big white union, put it in a pan with a good amount of olive oil, add salt. In an other little pan add oil and fry capers until crispy brown gold, put aside. Add a bit of water with the onions, let them shimmer for 40 minutes if you have that amount of time to give. Add passata, or some good freshly cut tomatoes, let some anchovis melt if you are in the mood for that salty deepness or some dark olives if you have them lying around. Meanwhile boil a generous amount of water for the pasta, add salt when boiling. Roll out the pasta in snakes of 1 cm wide, cut in half cm pieces and shape the pasta on a gnocchetti board. Roll out your little friends without too much pressure. Invite friends to roll with you. Once ready gently put them in the boiling water, they will pop up. Once they are all floating add them with a splash of pasta water to the pan with the tomato sauce. Ready to serve with some pecorino and a drizzle of oil! Mangiare.

Ps. on this photo many different pasta shapes can be detected, it was a very loose lesson on shapes and taste :)

To get infected with the fresh pasta virus navigate to Scuola di Arte Culinario Cordon Bleu in Firenze for a pasta lab.

One last photo… One neighbour says it’s a wolf (a lupo) for sure, I’m still thinking it is a fox with footprints that just got bigger because of the melting water. It is definitely not our little cat Lupa. Perhaps next season we will become expert people who can determine animals by poop and prints. Life goals keep on changing.

This became a longer scribble than I thought it would. Chop chop, off to a new year with more learnings and discovering new things.

Ciao 2025, Hup 2026

Anne Maike and co.

Inverno è qui

Winter is here

It arrived last Thursday morning. Real sticky big snow flakes were dropped on the mountain top. We made a good hike. Admired the white and grey. The view in the morning after a snowy night was over dramatic beautiful, in total awe I ran up and down the stairs ten times and raved at everyone about the pink gloomy Alps that are only visible at clear days. It felt like the cherry on top of our carrousel of friendship cake from the day we moved in until this first more silenced week. The energy brought by our friends is visible everywhere we look.

We started the renovation of our first guest room. We felt the energy of demolition and are now slowly putting the walls and cement and floors back in an aligned position. Every construction move we make we have to call Paolo, a local plumber, in Italian ‘hydraulico’, he is a man with a contagious happy energy that makes everyone wants to learn more about pipes and tubes. When Yannick joined him for lunch even his Italian started flowing like water.

More friends came as the energy wave continued, window shills are put in base paint, autumn leaves are put in big piles as a prep for the vegetable garden and we learned how to improve our plastering skills. We started a tiles-cleaning-station that people drop in and out of, it is a hell of job to clean 750 dirty-with-old-cemento granito tiles. But the tiles are a beauty. And renovating on a budget means that we sometimes make choices that challenge the value-time balance of life. But hey, the view is great while chipping of the cement, and using a mechanic grinding tool feels powerful and a step into a productive direction. Almost seventy tiles are done. You can do twenty five a day. Do the math. Come join us if you have time to spare.

Last week friends came also to find the combination of artistic work, rest and assist the construction works of our Cascina. Busy mornings in our restaurant kitchen as people found their ways to breakfast, snacks and work. And entering the kitchen ment also to cover a part of yourself in paint. But now we have a three layer orange-mustard-yellow kitchen that glows by itself. In the evening a lot of group effort was put in creating walnut-oil. So now we know that 5 kg of walnuts leads to 75 ml of oil. It’s a calming activity of cracking, pealing, heating and grinding.

We are still lost in paperwork. But it is a friendly kind of lost. Everyone we meet is willing to nicely show us the door that is closed, but that might open one day. Our brains get fried. We call, we drive, we wait. And then we go back to whatever renovating activity, or writing future artistic dreams - we were doing. Currently we are on a hunt of a commercialista, an accountant with knowledge on guiding our small artistic agriturismo to be. If persons or leads come into mind, sharing is appreciated.

I was able to make pasta most evenings. Sometimes people joined me, shaping forms, talking on life. For these cold nights this was my favourite recipe. Warm, salty, with a bite. Orecchiette integrale with anchovy and broccoli. For a 100 procent veggie version replace the anchovy for fried capers with salt.

Mix 100 Gram of semolina rimachinata flour with 100 grams of whole grain/integrale flower on a big board, make a well, slowly with a fork mix in the 150 ml of water, but use water as you please to make a non stick ball with your hands. Let it rest. Cut a white union finely. Put the union with good olive oil in a sauce pan, slow heat, add some water, make it juicy, add salt, take time. Twenty minutes on an onion are well spent. Roast or steam broccoli. I like crisps. So I put them in a warm oven for a little bit with some oil and salt. Melt ansjovis to taste in the onion saus. Put the water to boil. Cut the ball of fresh pasta in small pieces, roll out, cut a tiny 1cm piece with the roll facing your body, use a knife to cut a piece, roll that little friend inside out over your thumb to get that ear shape. Continue, take time. Gently put the pasta in the boiling water that you have generously salted. The pasta will float, put the boiled pasta with some pasta water with the onion sauce, add the crunchy broccoli. Serve with pan-gratata or with parmesan cheese. I think I did both.

I always want to credit Scuola di Arte Culinaria Cordon Bleu in Firenze, they are in all my pasta moves I make, and although I hardly make from a recipe book, I know I must have found the knowledge somewhere. So hereby. Forever in credito alla Scuola.

We are now collecting recipes for anything walnut based. Feel free to share yours. Also we are dreaming of walnut oil, if someone has an unused oil press in the corner of their hallway closet, please reach out.

Here is a recipe of the first dish that I, Anne Maike, made with nuts: Ravioli with pumpkin in a walnut Gorgonzola sauce.

Ingredients (serves 4)

150 semolina remachinata flour

150 00 flour

3 eggs

1 pumpkin

4 tablespoons spoons parmigiano reggiano

two handfuls shelled walnuts

150 gram ricotta

150 gorgonzola

25 gram butter

to taste: nutmeg, salt

Turn on the oven, place the whole pumpkin (zucca) in the oven, no hassle with cutting, peeling skin off or scraping out the seeds, 45 min at 180 degrees and it will be toasted and juicy on the inside. Sift the flower, make a crater, stirr in the eggs with a fork, little by little add the flower from the ‘walls’ of the crater, form a ball, kneed for 10 minutes until smooth and cover it to let it rest. For the filling, let the pumpkin cool down, remove the seeds (or reuse them in a creative way) and scoop the flesh out of the pumpkin in a bowl of a mixer, mix with the ricotta (best to let the ricotta leak some juice in a big sieve), add 4 tablespoons of parmigiana reggiano, and add to taste a pinch of cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Put the filling in a pastry bag and let it cool in the frigo. Roll out the pasta dough, either with the pasta machine or by hand with a roller (mattarello). I like ravioli quite thin but do as you please. Cut little squares of pasta, max 5 by 5 centimeters, add the filling (grape size) fold in triangle shape, place your thumb under the folded part and move the out ends of the triangle close to each other, and there you go: a Capello. Put the capelli on a tray with parchment paper. In a big pot bring a generous amount of water to a boil, when boiling add a small handful of salt, gently pour in the capelli, make sure they don’t stick to the button as the pumpkin filling can be a bit heavy. In an other pan toast the nuts, add a bit of salt, then add generous amount of butter, let it melt add the gorgonzola, add some pasta water and make a nice sauce. If you have some cream or panna in your fridge play with it. Gently add the ravioli to the sauce pan, stirr with love, make sure you’re not hurting the ravioli, they want to swim in the sauce. Serve with some more parmigiani e basta.

Next to the nut-discovery we learned we have a little overgrown fruit yard with prune, cherry, apple and kaki. Up the land we found a pomegranate tree and we picked kilos (more than 20) of cotton candy sweet moscato grapes. Our friends Han van Wieringen and Kyrian Esser turned them in grapes-many-ways, so we now have pots of marmelade, compote, melasse and dried grapes. The kitchen was filled with dripping sieves and the sweet smell of grapes.

For the fruit trees it would be best to get sheep or goats to help clean out all the plants that strangle the trees. And off course these animals would need a shelter or a shed for foxes and wolves. Learning one thing creates more ideas, so we roll from one to the other. We will now try to oversee when and how we can start this next phase of farming. In order to get the old agriturismo back on its feet and to add our art residency dreams to it, we need to understand more of the agricultural world in Cuneo Piemonte. So Anne Maike is now on her way to become a farmer, so we can take care of the land and grow fruit, vegetables and flowers :) A first visit to the farmers association has been made, it is a full on Italian journey and every day we navigate better in the community that we are now a part of. We thank the Italian people that we meet for their patience and creative listening to our krik-krack sentences. lo proviamo!

After putting 6 m3 of wood for the heating system in the shed, we packed our bags for a work trip to the Netherlands, where we are about to play our beloved theater piece Artificial By Nature, a philosophical minimal opera on the essence of being human (feel free to follow Nineties Productions on instagram for more info)

So long for this writing!

Ciao e bacio di Cascina

Ps . This pasta recipe gives credit to the amazing scuola di arte culinaria “Gordon Bleu” in Firenze where Anne Maike got to study the art of hand made pasta in two intensive pasta courses.

Let’s see how we experience this new way of story telling. This first one is a bit of a long read because we introduce our road leading up to this big change!

Last week we really moved from the Netherlands to Italy. A caravan of trucks and friends moved it’s way up to the Piedmontese landscape. From now on Prunetto will be ground base, here we will create an artists residency in jet unknown shape! Offcourse Amsterdam will stay our 2nd base where we will keep on creating and performing theater.

In this first week we greeted town locals, plastered a wall, painted a door, wood was delivered to heat the stove for the winter, the trucks where filled with 90 square meters of old tiles form the area and off course 2nd hand treassures (tresori usato), Miró picked castagnes with his classmates from his new school in a village nearby, and to top this romantic picture we found an piccolo cattina (cat) that seems to really fit our Cascina vibes. We are still lost in paperwork, we have to pay fines, tear down a wall and get permits on everything. Miauw

This is Lupa (wolverine), her mam, who is a wild cat roaming our area, left her behind, we hope to reunite them when this kitten is a bit older.

After a year full of bureaucratic, sometimes charming but completely incomprehensible Italian rules, we can finally say it: we own a old farmhouse, una cascina vecchia. In the south of Piedmont, in Prunetto. It is still standing. Mostly. And we are in love.

Here we dream big and shape thoughts on creating an art residency, a studio, an ecological plot of land where you can eat everything you grow, a bed and breakfast among walnut trees and vines, small holiday apartments, an inn for wandering thinkers, a workshop place to immerse yourself, learn to make pasta, taste wine—a place to have conversations that never end, to start things that don't have to end. Big dreams, wild plans. How and when all this will take shape is precisely our question. 

We—theater makers Yannick Noomen and Anne Maike Mertens, people who jump into things with just a little too much enthusiasm, not knowing how they will turn out—want to create a place where artists and bon vivants can recharge, find space for creativity, and feel at home by being somewhere else. 

This idea came about last year when, completely unexpectedly, we did not receive structural funding from the performing arts fund in the Netherlands. For twelve years, we built Nineties, our own theater company, from pioneers on the fringes to a permanent place in the system, and suddenly everything collapsed. What remained was a big gap and big dreams.

What do you do when structural subsidies disappear, but your artistic ambition remains intact? Our answer was as radical as it was hopeful: we sold our own house in the Netherlands and bought an old farmhouse in the hills of Piedmont, northern Italy. Not as an escape, but as a fundamental reorientation.

Buying the Cascina marks the beginning of a new journey, in which we are looking for sustainable ways to make ourselves, Nineties, and possibly other artists and creatives, more financially independent and future-proof. With Cascina Prunetto we want to create a cultural base that is more than just a personal refuge. In the coming season, we hope to develop plans to open it up to others as a space for work and reflection.

Prunetto is located in Alta Langa (Piedmonte) on the ridge between the Bormida and Uzzone valleys. From an altitude of 750 m, you can enjoy an unusual panorama stretching from the Ligurian Apennines to the Cottian Alps, offering a beautiful spectacle, the dry stone walls, the rivers flowing quietly in the valley, nature with the magical colors of the changing seasons. Turin is an hour and half drive away, in forty five minutes we can swim in the sea, Milano is a tree hour drive, and Ceva (30 min from the house) has a cute treinstation with good connections.

So long for this read, thank you for following our adventure and feel free to respond to this newsletter experiment. 

Last week Anne Maike expanded her pasta knowledge for the second time @scuolagordonbluefirenze. Pasta recipes will follow!