gabriele bonci {new pizza classes}

I get a lot of emails about my blog every day. People asking me about certain ingredients I’ve used or quantities for recipes. Or else to ask my advice about going to restaurants in Rome, Florence and Venice. I always try my very best to answer every single one. But lately there’s been one recurrent email request that I haven’t been able to respond to: Where is Gabriele Bonci teaching his much loved pizza making classes? Ever since I was lucky enough to attend Gabriele’s first pizza making class in Rome at Tricolore in 2011, my blog posts about him and his work have been a touch stone for those who want to learn his technique. Either by watching the videos I took, or else by coming to Rome and signing up for one of his classes.

But over the last few months if you went looking for information about those courses you’d come up with a big black hole. Bonci himself doesn’t have a web site, and the Tricolore website, where his course schedule used to be listed, has disappeared.

The story is that Tricolore has changed focus, and is undergoing a restructuring of its gourmet panino shop that will do away with the area dedicated to the cooking school. The result: the Bonci classes have been homeless for the last few months.

Today I’m finally able to respond to those emails. I’m happy to report that Bonci’s twice-monthly, two-evening courses, have found a new home: the Alice Academy. Alice is a pizza restaurant chain that has just inaugurated a new pizza cooking school. Although they will be using it mostly as a center to train their own pizzaioli, the state of the art workshops were planned together with Bonci, who will now be holding his own courses here twice a month.

The space, which is located behind St. Peters, just off Via Gregorio VII, is gorgeous. Large, bright and well designed the school is divided into three large rooms: two workshops and a restaurant area. There are also changing rooms, lockers, mixing machines…in other words, a professional pizza  school.

Here is a short video with a walk through of the space. The courses themselves – two evening explorations of how to make his famous pizza at home – remain the same. Or, rather, better. While the courses at Tricolore were a great learning experience, this new space is definitely more comfortable and spacious. And while Gabriele himself still only conducts the courses in Italian, if you’d like to have a personal translator at your side, they are now offering that service as well. (Full disclosure: the translator just happens to be Sophie, my daughter).

Here is the video, as well as a few photographs of the new space. At the bottom of this post you’ll find all the links and information you need to book a course, as well as links to all of my past blog posts about Bonci and his classes.

To find out the current list of courses visit this web site
Or send and email here.
The courses take place here:
Alice Academy
Via del Gelsomino,42

Some of my past blog posts about Bonci:

Bread Making with Gabriele Bonci
Making Pizza Dough with Gabriele Bonci
Creating Pizza Toppings with Gabriele Bonci
Gabriele Bonci: 2 Cool Pizza Tricks
Gabriele Bonci: Having Fun with Pizza
Gabriele Bonci: the Michelangelo of Pizza
Gabriele Bonci: Pizza al Formaggio
Tortano: Easter Bread with Gabriele Bonci