Italian American Allison Scola has traveled extensively around Italy for over 30 years. She fell in love at first sight with Sicily in 1996 and has been leading distinct tours there since 2014 through her boutique operation Experience Sicily. Her annual food-oriented tours operate under her “Stirring Sicily” platform.
Stirring Sicily's September 2025 tour has added one of Appetito’s favorite friends and Italian food & travel expert, Rossella Rago, as a co-host. We had to find out more about Stirring Sicily: Cooking in Italy with Rossella Rago, so we sat down at Rocco's Pasticceria on Bleeker Street in NYC’s West Village with this newly-formed dynamic duo for a couple of cannoli and a conversation.
Allison, tell us about the tour?
The prelude part starts on September 6th in Siracusa, from where we explore eastern Sicily for four days including a wine trip to Etna, visit Taormina and have a gelato experience. On the 10th of September, we head to Palermo, where we make a full group, which is 12 people or fewer. We’re based outside of Palermo in an agriturismo that is also an olive farm. From there, we have a cooking class and explore the Palermo markets for a street food tour. In the hills outside of Palermo, we visit a butcher and make sausage before going to a sheep farm where they make ricotta for us before we have a picnic with the foods we procured. We also visit the Monreale Cathedral and a winery in the nearby hills. Next, we go to Trapani for a cooking class and to see the salt flats.We have a day in Cefelu with a wine tasting. We cook in Arigento and visit the Valley of Temples. Finally, we have one last cooking class in Termini Imerese and have our farewell dinner!
Rossella: How did you get involved in this year’s tour?
I met Allison at an Italian festival in 2017, and we’ve been in each other's orbit through the Italian American community. I've been doing culinary tours of my own from 2013 until the pandemic. I did them in Puglia and Sorrento. I did Sicily once. What was so great about my tours in Puglia and Sorrento was that we always had a real expert wherever we were, but when we went to Sicily, we knew no one. So I felt like my Sicily tour wasn't my best tour, but I knew that the universe would bring us back to Sicily somehow.
I really wanted to resume tours, so I put the word out that I was interested. Some woman from Sardinia reached out to me, but the details seemed sketchy. I had just run into Allison at an event at the Columbus Citizens Foundation, so I called her and asked about the offer, and she was like, “No. That doesn't sound normal at all.” And I was like, damn, I really wanted to do a tour. And she's said, “Well, I have a tour in Sicily. I know you, and I like you. Why don't you do the tour with me?” Of course, I agreed. There’s synergy there. It felt like the right moment and the right person to do Sicily with because nobody knows Sicily better than Allison.
Allison, help us understand your Sicilian bonafides:
I'm a musician, a singer songwriter, and in 2007 I took a trip to Sicily. It wasn't my first time there, but that trip, for some reason, really transformed my thinking about how I wanted to make music. And I got very attracted to southern Italian folk music, so I started to incorporate that into my music making. As a result, I started to embrace more my Sicilian heritage, my interest in Italian American cuisine and culture. I started taking different courses on food culture. And I wrote an article in 2012 about cannoli that was published by the Inquisitive Eater, a food culture journal. It's called I Cannoli: Nothing Better in the World. It’s about 5,000 words, and the thesis compares Sicilian cannoli with Italian American cannoli. And so, this began a whole adventure for me to not only really understand cannoli, but to also understand the difference between our two cultures. This broad understanding is one of the things that make my tours unique. That, of course, and the amount of time I've spent on the ground there and the number of tours I've hosted. I also now live, part-time, in Palermo.
Rossella, what makes Sicily so distinct from the rest of Italy?
Everything. Sicily is a textured region. It's crunchy and salty and sweet. It’s over the top and Rococo. It's so different all over. There's Arab influence, African influence, Italian, Greek. There's a little bit of everything on one island. Sicily is colorful. Milan is beige. Sicily is multi-colored terrazza print. It’s an island where everyone's laughing and yelling and, you know, the guy at the fish market is smoking as he hacks off the head off a fish. It’s a fun place. You should come.
Stirring Sicily: Cooking in Sicily with Rossella Rago
Wednesday, September 10 to Wednesday September 17, 2025
With an optional Eastern Sicily Prelude from September 6 to 10!
