When in Rome, master pasta

Diane Seed didn't fall in love with Italy, she says emphatically, she fell in love with an Italian. That was 30 years since, or thereabouts, and now she lives in a Roman palazzo of such exquisite beauty that God alone knows what the bloke was like.

Having learned (or, rather, absorbed) the secrets of Roman cuisine, she wrote her first cookery book, 100 Pasta Sauces, whose faintly unpromising title cloaks the most wonderful, authentic-tasting Italian recipes I've ever come across. Continuing on the love trip, a trice after its publication, most of the English-speaking world fell in love with her - most of it, that is, apart from England. In consequence, the pupils on her week-long cookery courses are predominantly Australian or American.

By the sounds of things, the nationality of your cooking chums is paramount to the flavour of your trip. A trip full of Australians, as the redoubtable Ms Seed describes it, is like a kind of boozy kindergarten - she once had to lock away all her corkscrews because the antipodeans couldn't be trusted to wait until midday (midday!). The Americans on my trip were a lot more, well, restrained. I wouldn't say it was unusual for me to be the drunkest person in the room, but in this instance I was more like the drunkest person anyone had ever met. And that was just at lunchtime.

Goody-two-shoes Yanks notwithstanding, this is a delightfully civilised, enjoyable, extraordinary city-break. Yes, I am aware that I sound like Joyce Grenfell, and if you could see me, you'd also notice me sitting up straight - Diane Seed, by some quality which I can only put down to magic, brings out your best behaviour in a way that no one's been able to do since a mini Mars bar seemed like an acceptable reward for half an hour's utter silence.

The course starts with a meal in her palace apartment, which gives you all the benefits of having a friend in Rome with none of the drag of having to spend all week with them. The food is your classic sophisticated Italian fare - that is, a good deal too much of everything, all of which is too delicious not to finish. During each course, low-level gastronomic tuition is expertly interspersed with finishing-school standard chat - the story of a special mozzarella, fat with cream like a tiny edible waterbed, will segue effortlessly into an anecdote about three generations of a farming family all travelling to the market on the same donkey. Or something like that. It's very accomplished, put it that way. The Americans, to be frank, completely failed to appreciate the quality of Diane qua hostess - I think they thought all English people were like that. Of the Americans, two were a mother-daughter combo, both called Adrienne, who chose to pronounce that "Adrian" and decided from the get-go to match Diane, ingredient for ingredient, with a story about every foodstuff. "And these are olives," Teach would start, upon which a charming Southern drawl would chip in "... aah remember stealing olives from the graveyard. And wun day, I tol' my grandaddee where I'd been a-stealing 'em frarm, and he said, 'Honey. Those dead people ain't gonna miss 'um! They ain't gonna missum!' Lordy, no, they weren't." By the time we got to prawns on day three, they really were heaping improbability upon improbability (an anecdote about shrimps and one about artichokes and one about courgette flowers? Come on) but this in no way diminished their charm.

Otherwise, there was a twentysomething flower named Daisy (Henry James complexion, merchant bank salary, New England manners - good grief, if I'd been slightly more male I'd have married that girl), a doctor called Gary, who provided invaluable advice whenever we cut ourselves ("Just put a plaster on it, goddamit! You DON'T NEED ANTISEPTIC"), and a chef who I shan't name since I'm just about to defame him horribly by calling him the thorn in our collective side. He kept trying to show us how to chop garlic, you see - when, in truth, most of us won't ever need to chop it that fast, and were quite happy doing it in the traditional, pass-a-knifethrough-it way.

The cooking started the next day, at the civilised time of 10am, with huntsman's lamb, a pasta dish of such simple excellence that I've never been able to replicate it since, and some nice prawns in oil and such. The pace is relaxed, the mood is all studied Italian nonchalance, and the food is ready by noonish, upon which you sit down and eat it, have a crisp glass of white (me) or some water, and chat about how delicious it all is. The real skills you take away are less about actual dishes, which you could probably follow a recipe for, but a wider understanding of what goes with what, and how to do things properly. Diane was so full of injunctions about when you must "throw the whole lot away and start again" that it's a wonder she doesn't have whole families of scavengers (human and otherwise) living near her bins - except, of course, she doesn't make mistakes like overheating oil/garlic/ pasta. Ever.

So, by 2.30, if you've been paying attention, you're full enough and merry enough to relish the prospect of a mini-sleep, before your free spell in the evening, when it's time to get down to the serious business of going out and eating a whole lot more, cooked by a restaurant but no more tasty for that.

If it weren't for the fact that I would irredeemably have gone up a dress size if I'd stayed another day, I would happily have spent the rest of the summer there. One of Diane Seed's main teasers, in fact, is that she has so many people returning for a second or third trip that she constantly has to think up new dishes to teach them. Which as a testament to how much everyone likes her is perhaps not quite effusive enough, but is certainly getting there.

A six-day Roman Kitchen course in Rome with Diane Seed (00 39 06 6797103, fax 00 39 066797109, e-mail dianeseed@ compuserve.com) costs £450 (including two dinners and four lunches). Flights and accommodation not included; a list of hotels, all of which are walking distance from Diane's school in Via del Plebiscito, is provided.