About us
We cook our way through the listings so you only have to book once
Italian cooking classes, in Italy and in the cities where Italian food has made a second home. Every class here is checked against the school’s own booking page, and where we are not sure we say so rather than guess.
- 820
- classes compared
- 131
- ranked guides
- 534
- schools and hosts
- 21
- cities worldwide
Our method
Four things decide whether an afternoon is worth it
A cooking class is sold as an experience, which makes the listings hard to compare and easy to dress up. These are the four we record for every class, because they are the four you would ask about if you could phone the kitchen.
- 01The real priceWhat it costs once wine, a market trip or a sit-down meal is counted, in the currency the school charges rather than a converted guess.
- 02Time at the benchHow long the session runs, and how much of it you spend cooking rather than watching someone else cook.
- 03Group sizeTwelve people is a different afternoon to thirty, and the number is usually buried in the terms rather than the headline.
- 04What you actually makeThe dishes by name, and whether you sit down and eat them when you are done.
Details come from the page each class is booked on. Every ranked guide carries a “How we chose these” note explaining what was compared for that list, because what matters for a pasta class in Rome is not what matters for a week in Sicily.
Where we cover
Italian cooking, wherever it is being taught
Italy is the heart of it, from Rome and Florence to Sicily and the Amalfi Coast. But Italian food has been taught well outside Italy for a century, and plenty of people want to learn it without the flight.
So we cover 21 cities in all: pasta rolling in Brooklyn, pizza in Melbourne, risotto in London, gelato in Los Angeles. A class is judged on the same four things wherever it runs, which is what makes the lists comparable.
Browse every destination
21 city archives
How we pay for this
Two ways, both worth knowing
Some links to schools are affiliate or partner links, which means we may earn a commission if you book through them, at no extra cost to you. This never changes the order of a list. We rank on what a class offers, and plenty of the classes we rank highest earn us nothing at all.
We also sell advertising directly, and those units are labelled “Advertisement” wherever they appear. An advertiser cannot buy a position in a ranking or a kinder write-up, and being listed in a guide is free and stays free.
When we get it wrong
Tell us, and we will fix it
Prices change, schools close, and a class that ran weekly last spring may not run at all this year. Corrections are the fastest way this site gets better, and we would much rather hear it from you than leave it sitting there.