How we met: ‘The first time I cooked for him I served the only thing he hated’
In 2011, during the Arab spring uprising, Giulia Laganà’s humanitarian work took her to Sicily in southern Italy. “I was working for a UN refugee agency, helping people who were arriving and monitoring conditions,” she says. Mads Frese, a Danish journalist living in Rome, travelled to the island in October as part of a group of reporters who were producing a film about the crisis. They needed access to interviewees. “I’d called Giulia before we came, through some contacts, hoping that she could help set up meetings,” he says.
After arriving, he drove from Palermo to Cara di Mineo, the largest refugee camp in Sicily at the time.
“I remember hearing that Gaddafi had been killed. We had no idea what would happen next,” he says. When the journalists reached the camp, Mads got the chance to meet Giulia in person. “We’d spoken in Italian on the phone, so I think he was a bit taken aback by my English. He was expecting me to be more typically Italian,” she laughs. “I’m from Rome originally, but grew up bilingual and studied in the UK.” Giulia says she found Mads handsome, but he didn’t say much. “She sounded so Roman on the phone that I was just expecting to meet someone completely different,” he says.
Over the next few days, Giulia took the journalists out for some meals and found them a temporary flat in her building. “I cooked for them one night and it turns out I served the only thing he hated – strong cheese,” she says. “But then, one day, I slipped a slice of homemade chocolate cake into his flat. He definitely liked the cake.”
Despite cooking mishaps, they started to realise there was more than friendship between them. When Mads went back to Rome, they chatted on the phone constantly. At the end of the month, Giulia decided to visit him. “That’s when we went on our first proper date,” she says. “A lot had been going on in the world at that time, which meant the first few weeks after we met we spoke a lot about politics. It made us realise how much we had in common.”
A few weeks later, she moved to Syracuse in Sicily and Mads came to see her. “I just arrived with my suitcase,” he laughs. For the next few months, he travelled between Sicily and Rome, spending time with Giulia whenever he could. “We talked about everything, but especially travel,” he says.