Rachael Ray shuns NYC chaos for peaceful Italian countryside paradise

Although Rachael Ray calls New York City home, she’s not the biggest fan of the Big Apple.

The former Food Network star, who has homes in the city, as well as upstate New York and Italy, admitted that while her husband, John Cusimano, prefers the hustle and bustle, she enjoys the quieter life in their Tuscan villa.

“My husband loves being in New York,” Ray told Us Weekly in a new interview. “And I tell him, ‘Hey, go as often as you like, stay as long as you want.’ I come to New York and upstate New York when I have work, I prefer Italy.” 

She continued, “It’s quiet. The dog is much happier. She hates New York City. Bella is not a New Yorker at all. So, for the dog’s sake, I spend as much time [in Italy] as I can. She has a swimming pool and 66 hectares to run around on, and everything is very quiet, and the air is very fresh, and we have huge gardens and a vineyard and olive trees, and I just prefer that life.”

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Ray also chose Italy when she and Cusimano celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary last month.

“We went to see some of our friends and [went] to our favorite restaurants in Florence and Rome,” Ray told the outlet. “We live in Tuscany, so we can bop back and forth to both of those places pretty quickly. So we just … we were very chill this year. We had parties for 60 to 100 people over the decade, but this year we just went with us. Two nights in Florence, two nights in Rome.”

In 2021, Ray revealed in her magazine, Rachael Ray In Season, that she’d purchased the home in Tuscany the year prior.

“I’m writing this just before I go to Italy for the first time in three years,” she wrote in the magazine, per People. “I love it there and have missed it. My mother’s family and both of John’s parents’ families hail from there. My husband and I got married there. And three years ago, I achieved my life’s goal of buying a property there, in Tuscany.”

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When she and Cusimano bought the property, she said he called it a “war zone” – it was two structures without plumbing or electricity, and she recalled him asking, “Honey, don’t you want to look at a…house?”.

“But I fell in love with the fields and the views and I thought for the money we’d pay for a house, we could build something that’s really, truly ours,” she explained.

“In Tuscany, the air smells different from any other place on earth I’ve visited,” Ray described. “It’s sweet and filled with the scent of agricultural wonder. The olive trees, vineyards, fecund gardens, incredible landscapes and views…it overwhelms you and it’s what I’ve missed the most — the air! The first time I went, 20 years ago, I felt it as soon as I touched the ground.”

In 2022, she starred in a limited reality series called “Rachael Ray’s Italian Dream Home,” detailing some of the renovation process. Last year, she began filming a new show, “Rachael Ray in Tuscany,” focusing on Italian cuisine.

While Ray seems to have no shortage of praise for Italy, she spoke with the New York Post in April 2024 about some horrors she’d experienced in New York City.

In one story, she spoke about being mugged outside her apartment in Queens when she was younger, recalling, “He has literally a Glock in his hand and sticks it in my back, and I scream so loud. I think they heard it in Jersey … I freaked the flip out, and I think I scared him more than he scared me.”

She added, “I sprayed him in the face with mace and he was not happy. I still feel really bad about it, actually. I don’t think that child would have hurt me.”

Still, she said the mugger came back a second time because he was angry, and he pushed her down an alleyway but was chased off by a dog that lived in her building.

“There were roaches in my apartment, but I stayed because I was so worried about the dog that lived there,” she said.