Katie Parla always wanted to live in Rome. Growing up in New Jersey with restaurant-industry parents, she fell in love with Italian food at an early age and set her sights on the pasta capital of the world. “I decided as a teenager that when I grew up I’d move here and live here forever,” she remembers. “That was the one thing that I knew to be true in my future.”

Two decades later, Katie is a widely recognized authority on Roman cuisine, a New York Times best-selling cookbook author, cohost of an Italian food podcast, and a popular culinary tour guide. She even launched her own Rome-based publishing company to produce her own titles locally, like the recently released Food of the Italian Islands.