For a family who hardly eats out, I knew for years that when we would fulfil our dream to visit Italy, primarily to eat pasta by the beach in plenty of sun, we’d be eating at restaurants and cafes. A lot. And that’s exactly what we’re doing now.
We started our trip with six days in Rome, eating impeccable Italian food one to two times a day. A big shift for our digestive systems, which at home enjoy Italian (home-cooked) food only once or twice a week.
We also have a 1.5-year-old son, so we still cook some meals. While he eats whatever we eat, we’ve wanted to keep up his intake of vegetables and legumes, and not overload his system with constant carbs.
As the trip went on, I began to wonder:
Would I ever get bored of Italian food?
Would I stop desiring the incredible tastes of sweet carbs, cheese and vegetables?
Could I eat Italian food for the entire 2.5-week trip?
We came prepared. Our digestion-supporting travel toolkit included:
Dry roasted fennel seeds – chewed after meals or gelato to support digestion.
Thin lassi (takra) – water mixed with a few spoonfuls of yoghurt, a pinch of salt, and cumin when available. Keep it in a bottle and shake. Ideal in the Roman summer, we’d drink around three bottles each daily, and would drink more if we could access yoghurt more.
Herbal helpers like Shodana Vati before dinner for digestion and elimination support, and Swagni, taken as drops on the tongue after heavier meals to help “cook” any lingering ama or undigested food (“pacana”).
A delicious chicory and fava bean dish.
These Ayurvedic tools not only support digestion amidst daily cheese and wheat, they also bring in the pungent, bitter, and astringent tastes we miss in a sweet-carb-heavy diet.
Thankfully, Italy offers cicoria (chicory), a bitter leafy green found in many restaurants that brings iron-rich nutrients and that much-needed taste balance.
From Restaurants to Wild Harvest
I travelled from England to the Netherlands to Italy with turmeric, cumin, fennel, ghee, and whole green mung dal in my bag, ready for some nourishing home-cooked meals. But something shifted as we left the city and headed toward Puglia’s southeast coast. Suddenly, there was wild food everywhere.
As a forager wherever I travel, I noticed:
- More Italians forage compared to other countries. They casually pick fruits in car parks or roadside greens for lunch.
- The wild foods here are familiar. Most people who follow my Instagram foraging videos from Australia or India have never seen those plants. But in Italy, I’m foraging familiar fruits and vegetables – wild, seasonal, and bursting with nutrients.
- Many of the weeds I forage in Australia are actually native to Europe. Finding them here in their ancestral lands is grounding and exciting, feeling natural and offering a comforting rightness.
Most Fruit Doesn’t Taste Like It Used To
Lately, I keep hearing the same thing, especially from those born before the ’80s: fruit just doesn’t taste the same.
This is one of the reasons I forage. Wild food, most of the time, tastes better and is more nutrient-dense than even organic farmed food.
Most fruit these days is bland, not because nature failed, but because shelf life and appearance have been prioritised over flavour. Supermarkets want uniformity. Fruit is picked unripe, chilled, and bred for firmness and profits. The result? Produce that’s firm, dull, and lacking the sun-ripened sweetness that older generations remember.
If you want to reconnect with real flavour and vitality, consider foraging. It’s a direct line to nourishment, nature, and taste you simply can’t find in most stores.
5 Wild Foods I’m Foraging in Italy This Summer
1. Capers
Do you know what a caper plant looks like? I didn’t.
It’s strange and telling that most people don’t even know what the plants look like that produce the foods they eat every day.
Capers are small, round, dark green buds. I didn’t avoid them completely, but I always had to double check, unsure if they were somehow sea-animal based, which says a lot about how little I knew about the plant itself.
One morning while doing Sūrya Namaskar near the castle fortress in Lucera, I saw an old man harvesting capers off the castle walls. Though we couldn’t understand each other, I recognised one word: “aceto” (vinegar). It reminded me of a spring we visited in Rome called “Acqua Aceto,” said to taste like vinegar due to its mineral content.
Turns out, capers aren’t eaten raw. They’re pickled or cured, hence the vinegar. Since that morning, I’ve spotted caper plants everywhere, from Lucera to the Puglian coast.
2. Prickly Pear (Fico d’India)
I first tried these pink cactus fruits in Moroccan markets. Now I see them growing wild all over Puglia.
Be careful. These fruits are covered in tiny hair-like spines called glochids, which are surprisingly irritating. I needed tweezers after my first forage. Some plants are worse than others. Peel them or split them. Inside, they’re sweet with a touch of sourness and astringency from their many edible seeds.
Medicinally, prickly pears cool the liver, hydrate the body, and supports gentle elimination. It’s the ultimate wild summer fruit.
3. Wild Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare)
This plant is everywhere, along roadsides, beaches, and cliffs in Italy, and across much of Australia’s east coast too.
It’s not the same as the fennel bulb sold in shops (Foeniculum vulgare var. azoricum). That’s a cultivated variety bred for its large edible base. Wild fennel has a very small bulb. Instead, it offers aromatic fronds, flower heads, and seeds.
The fennel seeds commonly used in cooking, especially Indian cuisine, ncome from this wild type. They’re more intense and medicinal than cultivated seeds.
We use the delicate fronds (not the stalks) to finish dishes with a crisp green freshness and a sweet aniseed tone. I also LOVE nibbling the yellow flowers as a light snack and collecting seeds for my spice cabinet.
4. Figs
Possibly my favourite fruit.
They’re everywhere, big wild trees, smaller ones pushing through cracks in the rocks. It’s no surprise, since other Ficus varieties grow with equal persistence and resilience.
The best fig I ate? From a massive tree in a national park that my son and I stumbled upon. One was so sweet, I couldn’t even finish it and had to hand it to my wife (though I’d already had ten). Not dry-sweet like packaged figs. These were dripping with juicy nectar, deeply satisfying and hydrating.
5. Wild Garlic (Allium ampeloprasum?)
Growing right out of the rocky cliffs, this wild garlic had small, translucent bulbs and long thin leaves. It was clearly weather-exposed and deprived, and didn’t have much flavour—but still, it was a joy to eat wild garlic in Italy.
3 Golden Foraging Principles
Always forage with care:
- Safety – Be sure you know the plant, its lookalikes, and your body’s response. Is it sprayed?
- Sustainability – Only harvest when abundant, in season, and in ways that support regrowth.
- Respect – Honour the land, the species, and traditional knowledge.
Foraging is relational. Learn from the land. Harvest with humility.
2 Responses
I loved this email and resonated with all of it in such a serendipitous way! My partner and I have been in Italy this summer too, and doing the exact same! Eating out joyfully as it’s such a treat for us (and a shift from our usual lifestyle) and foraging everywhere we can! We’ve stumbled upon so much red clover, fresh stinging nettles, yarrow, fennel, elderflower and plantain. Thanks for this lovely share of what you have been up to, it was thoroughly enjoyed ❤️
Thanks so much for sharing Zoe. yummy, we also enjoyed the fennel and plantain lancelotta. Dylan