By 16, Mr. Rocco was modelling for big agencies, including Elite and Armstrong Men. He and Ms. Rocco took acting classes together. And when both went off to York University, they ran a restaurant, La Madonnina, in Woodbridge, after Ms. Rocco’s father, who worked in real-estate development and construction, bought the building. “There’s a sexiness about the restaurant business and we’ve always loved food, but there’s nothing glamorous about it,” she says. They gave it up after a year to pursue their acting.
In 1997, without success in the feature film world, they figured a food show would be better. In Italy on holiday, they shot a video on their last day in Florence and later showed it to a Toronto production company. “We shot it on instinct,” Mr. Rocco explains. The demo led to a 26-episode TV series called Avventura, which was “a hybrid of travel and cooking.”
The following year, they moved to Rome. “Why not? We were young,” Mr. Rocco exclaims. They wanted to do a show about the food culture. “Rome confirmed that yes, there’s a show here in the Italian lifestyle of connecting to each other through food,” he says.
Upon their return to Toronto, they pitched the idea to The Food Network, insisting on producing it themselves. “We knew what the brand was even then.” But television executives wanted control and the deal fell through, prompting the couple to withdraw money they had saved to buy a house and go back to Italy to shoot a 30-minute pilot with a crew of ten. “It was a huge leap of faith,” Ms. Rocco says.
The Food Network loved it.
“The fact that we were married was the best thing,” says Mr. Rocco of their 15-year marriage. “When one of us would get down, the other would be encouraging. I would sometimes be, like, ‘I should just go get an ordinary job,’ and she’d be, ‘No, no, no. Keep the dream.’”
“I always had a belief it was going to happen,” she says.
Their Dolce Vita brand is a “lifestyle that’s aspirational,” they explain. And so is theirs as a couple. They are renting a townhouse while they wait for their house in Toronto’s upscale Rosedale neighbourhood to be built – a project that hasn’t been without controversy. They bought the property three years ago and have run into objections not just from the city but from snooty neighbours. One actually wondered why the young couple didn’t aspire to live in Woodbridge, rather than central WASPdom.
“So we forgot about putting in big lions at the portico,” deadpans Ms. Rocco, joking about villa-like architectural style.
“And no arched gateways,” adds her husband, beaming his smile.
“Oh no,” she says, eyes twinkling at him as she laughs lightly, flips her mane of hair behind her shoulders and leans down to scoop up a child.
Ah, the sweetness of life. If the Roccos can exploit stereotypical Italian life and style for their brand, they’re also unafraid to make fun of it. They’re successful hybrids themselves, after all – as Canadian or Italian as the setting dictates.
