Margaret Cowan

Since 1995 Margaret Cowan of Vancouver, BC, has owned a tour company, Mama Margaret & Friends Cooking Adventures in Italy, offering cooking and wine tours throughout Italy. The tours are actually cultural immersion adventures with a food focus--you meet a cast of local characters, many off the tourist path.

She says, "There’s something bonding about cooking together in Italy. I’ve seen friends and families reconnect and deepen their bonds of love, especially people celebrating milestone birthdays or anniversaries. It’s a celebration of life."

She’s the author of Your Guide to 133 Italian Cooking School Holidays and How I Fell In Love With An Italian Corkscrew, a wacky little tale (don’t worry, it’s not true). Under the humour lies a message, If you open your heart and your mind to someone "unlikely", you may meet the love or the friend of your life.

Margaret has also written articles on travel with personal growth themes online and offline in many countries.

An active member of Toastmaster Club 59 in Vancouver, she has a Competent Toastmaster certificate and gives fun, informative, inspiring talks on Italian travel and stories of lessons from her travels and life.

More Bio Details....

Margaret caught the travel bug as a little girl. She knew the location of every country in her stamp collection and wrote to several penpals around the world.

As a commerce student at UBC in Vancouver, in 1971 she was the president of the local chapter of AIESEC, an international job/study exchange for commerce and economics students.

In 1972 and 1973 she hitch hiked and backpacked around Europe and worked through AIESEC in France.1972 marked the beginning of her love of Italy, the longest love affair of her life...so far. She fell in love with the city of Florence and a Sardinian commerce student.

After careers as a mortgage broker and property manager, in 1977 she left Canada to discover life in Italy. She taught English privately and in language schools and loved it. She worked as a maid at an Amalfi Coast villa, sold sweaters in the Florence market and worked at Florence hotel reception desks. She didn’t want to marry her Tuscan boyfriend so returned to Vancouver in 1980.

After a brief, eye-opening stint selling real estate, she taught English as a Second Language to adult immigrants from all over the world for nine years. Ever seeking new, stimulating experiences, she branched out into creating, managing and teaching in job training and placement programs for immigrant women.

One winter she taught basic literacy to adults in Canada’s Arctic. On Baffin Island in January she and three adventurers rode for a day on sleds drawn by dog teams and camped ove ight in an igloo.

Deaths in her family in 1986 and 1990 made her dig deep into herself and start a lifelong path of personal growth and awareness.

She has traveled widely, discovering more about herself and other people. Apart from her twice yearly trips to Italy, her travel adventures range from riding a camel and camping in Tunisia’s desert for three nights to visting refugee camps in Thailand to experiencing local people’s generosity in the Cook Islands.

She is single, 57 and loves living close to the sea in beautiful Vancouver.