My favourite drink as a child was peach juice. My father’s family are from Portofino, so we’d always go there during the summer holidays. I was fascinated by the kids on the beach drinking cartons of peach juice because it was so alien to me. Drinking it felt so much more exotic than the apple juice and Ribena I was used to in London. Even now, when I take my kids [Connie, 13, Winter, nine, and Celeste, three] to the beach, I always have a carton of peach juice because it reminds me of those Italian summers.
. I take my coffee-making quite seriously. Not to an uber-hipster barista level, but I do have a fancy machine that freshly grinds the beans. I love the house smelling of coffee in the morning because it symbolises the beginning of a new day. It reminds me of staying with my Italian nonna and the smell of the moka pot. It was like clockwork: every day, as soon as the coffee started brewing, the whole house woke up.
The first place to serve me alcohol was a bar in Portofino. Now it’s called Portofino Bistrot, but back then it was the Scafandro. It was a very cool bar in the 1990s, and I became friends with the barman, who would make me Campari cocktails because I was obsessed with the colour. He also made me these mixtapes as he knew I loved music, and I still have them all stacked up: ‘Portofino 89’, ‘Portofino 92’ and what have you.
Jack enjoyed campari cocktails in Portofino. I had tried alcohol before then, probably when I was seven or eight. My grandfather would give me two fingers of red wine in a glass with fizzy water at lunch. I always felt very grown-up drinking with the adults.
