The photographer – and paterfamilias to an enormous brood of beautiful children and hunting hounds – Mr Oddur Thorisson is a prolific traveller. Mr Thorisson will very often pick up sticks with his wife Mimi, author of the forthcoming food book, Old World Italian: Recipes And Secrets From Our Travels In Italy, and family, from their new-ish home base in Torino, and head off to Paris, say, for fashion week (in which his children may be modelling for Bonpoint). Or to Venice, where he and Ms Thorisson host culinary workshops. To Medoc, where the Thorissons have a home (across the street from our friends Mr Matt Hranek and Ms Yolanda Edwards) – all the while eating, photographing and generally making merry. And they’ve even managed to get the show back on the road after the worst of the quarantine in Italy, packing five of their children and two of their dogs into an SUV for a road trip that took them to Tuscany, Rome, around Sicily, to Puglia and then home – over a span of nearly three months.

As they pulled back into their hometown, to “do a few rounds of washing machines,” as Mr Thorisson puts it, we asked him to share a few of his favourite pictures and stories from their summer on the road.

“I’ve been joking that it was a great blessing to be on this side of the border, so that we were essentially locked inside of Italy all summer – where everyone else usually wants to be. We were very happy just to kind of try things we didn’t know so very well. It was a good moment to just take it a bit slower. And obviously, this year, so many things we cancelled or postponed, which meant that we were often alone in looking to rent an apartment – from Rome to Filicudi. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these cities empty like that and spend some real time there. We had been meaning to go to Florence just before the lockdown because we always thought that we didn’t give it enough of a chance. We spend a lot time in Tuscany, but Florence was just always full of tourists and difficult to kind of get intimate with the city. There is an Englishman, Tom in Florence, a painter who has been living in Florence for a long time. And, you know the power of Instagram – we follow each other and I’ve always thought maybe he could paint a portrait of Mimi. Then we were in Florence, so we met and that was in his studio. I guess I prefer low light – I mean, photography is about light, so if something is evenly lit, there is no drama.”

“We had this apartment near the Spanish Steps and, unbelievably, everything was open. All the restaurants were open, but you didn’t need any reservations, Which is a nice feeling because we usually have to plan well ahead, like, ‘Hey, I would like six people, eight people’. We just walked around, had carbonara like eight times, ate at al Moro – a favourite of ours – and this is at Piperno in the old ghetto.”

“Because we had the house booked in Filicudi, we drove down to Villa San Giovanni in Calabria and took the ferry to Messina, left the car and took the boat to Filicudi and got soaked. It was like we had taken a shower when we got there. Filicudi is incredibly beautiful, very steep. There aren’t really sandy beaches and the whole side of the island wasn’t really open, so if we wanted anything – I was trying so hard to find shampoo – you’d end up boating long distances. It is very charming, and you can buy fish from the local fisherman. Really, one of the most special places, and we wanted to have the kinds of days where you wake up and you read a book, maybe you take a swim and have an amaro and go to sleep and you don’t feel, ‘Oh my God, we didn’t go to this other island…’ But it didn’t really happen that way, because we have so many kids – there is always the Peter Sellers moment where you’re lying in bed and it is like, ‘Hey, do you mind, the kids want to go swimming…’”

“Then we went back, grabbed the car and drove to Palermo where we stayed at the Grand Hotel Piazza Borsa, this great old-school place, very Wes Anderson, with the staff in uniforms. I think Palermo is probably one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And we were, as usual, just on a massive quest for food – looking for the best cannoli, everything. I had been in Palermo before, but I have a feeling that Palermo has not been very touristy over the years. I think people probably just more or less ate at home and all these joints that cook good Sicilian, when a guy is too old or dies, it just closes. I think the older you get, you stop worrying too much about finding the best places. That’s a bit of a Brooklyn sport, a New York Magazine thing: the three best pizzas in New York City. There’s really three categories of cannoli: there are a few very, very good ones, a lot of mediocres, and a few bad ones.”

“This year, the car rental places were very in demand. I was thinking of maybe renting a van, one of those Mercedes or something. But it’s really boring to have that car once you’re at your destination; if you want to drive around, there’s always some taxi driver, or a tour bus. When we were in Marsala someone drove into my side, so we had to find another car and it took a week. We had myself and Mimi and five of our kids – our 17-year-old also came and met us for a while, so for a bit we were eight. And all they had was an Audi – nice car, but, you know. So, for the older kids, there were alternate modes of transportation. They took trains ahead to meet us. I love Marsala wine, so I loved that. We stayed there two weeks, and went to Favignana, and Modica.”

“I always have this idea that when you travel, you need to take a linen suit from Caruso and maybe a Boglioli jacket and some nice linen shirts and maybe loafers. But on this kind of holiday, it’s just so hot, even if I ended up having nice dinners, I’m in my Orlebar Brown shorts the whole time. I didn’t know Puglia very well before this, but I was quite surprised. It’s a different type of Italy. I mean, there’s probably a little bit of what people would expect to see in Greece. It’s a kind of lime-washed region, all white, and in many ways much easier than Sicily – just in terms of getting from here to there.”

“Our daughter was arriving to the airport in Milan at 2.00am, so we went to pick her up and then drove back near Piacenza. You know, what I think what we’ll do now, which is what is great about Italy, is little trips. If you do it strategically, you can go to the lakes, you can go to Lake Maggiore on a little Hemingway trail, and swim in the lake, have good food. Or you could, which is what we’re planning to in the next days, stop in Sorrento for 10 days. What you never really get used to – and we’ve been in Torino for about two years now – is that just a short drive away, whether you go to Vicenza or Como or Genoa or just this tiny town, the food, the recipes the ingredients are all slightly different. Right now, though, we thought we ought to just go home and do a few rounds of washing machines.”