Gabriella Becchina

Sicily Cultural Tourism Expert & Chef

Gabriella Becchina is the founder of Gabriella’s Key To Sicily, a Sicily-based curatorial service since 2010 offering international clientele any Sicilian experience imaginable.

For the prior decade she managed her family’s farm, fruit, vegetables, olives and olive oil production, while renovating antique barns, stables, a gate house, creating suites in the historic main villa, and launching a hospitality concept providing visitors and aficionados with the opportunity to immerse themselves in all things Sicily during their stay. Guest activities involved yoga retreats, painting residencies, farm and oil mill tours, discovering surprising historic sights, guided cured olives and olive oil tastings, cooking classes, market & sea to table workshops, foraging expeditions, mushroom and truffle excursions, nature hikes with botanists and geologists.

Gabriella is an expert, educator, and entrepreneur in Sicilian tourism, having opened up a world previously unseen by outsiders. She is a producer of specialist Sicilian products, a sought-after business consultant and private caterer.

In essence, after a lifetime of sharing her favorite people, foods, and sceneries with friends, journalists, food & travel authors, after connecting her finds and sources with importers and distributors of Italy’s finest, Gabriella has harnessed her enthusiasm and turned her curiosity and interest for Sicily into a pursuit of the many ways in which they can be conveyed, promoted and enjoyed as 360-degree experiences.

Gabriella’s vision, passion and tenacity have been the driving forces behind, not only her own, successful businesses - including ‘Key to Sicily’ - but she has introduced much of hidden Sicily, to the world. Green, freshly pressed olive oil; Sicilian heritage wheat flours; pane nero baking in America; biscotti piccanti awareness; each owe a debt of gratitude to Gabriella for the publicity she has generated for them.

In 2006, at a winery in the heart of Western Sicily, Priscilla Conran praised Gabriella’s strawberry-tomato-fresh olive oil gazpacho, a recipe she’d adapted from a friend, as the “best thing” she’d ever eaten. After her passing, her husband Antonio Carluccio returned in 2014 to one of Gabriella’s own lovingly restored beachside properties. He gave her his latest autographed cookbook (“To one of us”) and this is what he had to say about her:

Gabriella went beyond the expected to make our stay memorable. Gabriella's experience, she produces her own very special olive oil, and passion for local food and artisans was invaluable and we saw and tasted things we would have otherwise found hard to discover. She has a comprehensive knowledge and interest in the history and character of Sicily, which she shared with us.

It is his partner Sabine’s words which probably best portray Gabriella’s endeavor, sensibility and style: “Dear Gabriella, in email as in person you are amazing and a jem! Without you a) our holiday would not have been what it was and b) I would not have fallen in love quite as much with Selinunte. You make people's moments special. What a gift! There is a connection which transmitted great warmth and spirit. Thank you!”