Marcella Hazan was born in Cesenatico, a fishing village on the Adriatic in Emilia-Romagna, Italy s foremost gastronomic region. After receiving her doctorates from the University of Ferrara in natural sciences and in biology, she lived and traveled throughout Italy. In 1967 she and her husband, Victor, an Italian-born American, came to New York, and shortly thereafter Mrs. Hazan started giving lessons in Italian cooking in her New York apartment. With the publication of The Classic Italian Cook Book, her reputation as America s premier teacher in Northern Italian cooking spread throughout the country. Her second book, More Classic Italian Cooking, was published in 1978 to broad acclaim, and the school she opened in Bologna, Italy, drew students from all over the world. These two books have been brought together in a single volume, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Mrs. Hazan now teaches cooking in Venice, where she lives in a sixteenth-century palazzo whose top floor she and her husband have restored."