What surprised me was the plastic salad spinner in a lower cupboard of the sleek cook’s kitchen Giuliano Hazan designed for his Sarasota home.

I’d expected the  six-burner Wolf Gourmet gas range under its custom glass hood, the little secrets like the shallow toe-kick drawer for storing serving platters, the easy-on-the-feet (and dropped crockery) cork floor and the wide-open floorplan, ideal for connecting the cook to his dinner guests.

But a salad spinner? It’s useful, certainly. It’s just that it seems too pedestrian to be included in the culinary battery of a best-selling, second-generation Italian cookbook author who was named the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ 2007 Cooking Teacher of the Year.

That’s Giuliano for you, though, a down-to-earth man who happens to know more about Italian food and cooking than most people. Except for his mother, of course. She’s Marcella Hazan, the 83-year-old author and teacher who, beginning in the 1970s, pretty much single-handedly tugged American perception of Italian cooking out of the spaghetti-and-meatballs ghetto and got us thinking instead about extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and pesto.

Marcella and husband Victor, a connoisseur of Italian wines, live on Longboat Key now, but Giuliano grew up on New York City’s Upper East Side and in Italy. His mother taught regularly at her own cooking school in Bologna, which Giuliano one day would run, and he spent summer vacations with his grandmother in Marcella’s hometown of Cesenatico, a low-key resort on the Adriatic with a port designed by Leonardo da Vinci.

We all know the old argument over nature versus nurture: Which counts for more in determining a person’s behavior (or what today might more likely be called lifestyle)? Genes or early environment?

In Giuliano’s case, the famously frenetic pace of his childhood in Manhattan seems to have lost out to a more measured, less hurried approach to life.

Simplify. Savor. Slow down.

These bite-size pieces of advice, let’s call them The Three S’s, make serviceable shorthand for his approach to cooking and to teaching others how to cook. "Satisfying food does not have to be complex or take a long time to prepare,” Giuliano observed in the second of his three cookbooks, Every Night Italian. “Often the simpler it is the better it tastes, and simplicity is what Italian cooking is all about.”

So: Simplify your approach to menus in favor of “simple and delicious” dishes. Savor the pleasures of the kitchen, allowing the smells and sights and textures to delight you. Don’t forget to taste often. Slow down at the table. A meal is neither a race nor a contest to see who can put away the most chow before the buzzer sounds. Italian meals typically include many paced courses, each one relatively small but full of flavor. The goal is satisfaction, not that overstuffed feeling we’ve all experienced too often.

“If Americans would just reduce portion sizes,” Giuliano says, “there would be widespread weight loss.”

Giuliano learned to cook in the same organic, measured way expressed in his Three S’s. Instead of enrolling in one of the culinary world’s four-star pressure-cooker academies, he learned to cook over “a lifetime of slow absorption.”

“I grew up cooking,” he said in a recent conversation at his colorful home on the tranquil banks of Phillippi Creek, “watching my mother cook and teach. I learned to cook by doing it.”

 Students at his own cooking school near Verona are treated to the same method of learning, at least for the week they’re in residence at Villa Giona, the 12-acre Renaissance country estate a few miles from Romeo and Juliet’s city of Verona. Recipes are the last item on the syllabus, not the first. Instead, students get their hands dirty under Giuliano’s tutelage right away. They peel and slice and chop and filet and mix pasta dough with their hands. They observe the teacher’s techniques and try them out immediately.

“I break cooking down for them to its most basic elements, and then I help them to make the skills and techniques I teach them their own,” he says.

But why no recipes right off the bat? Why wait until the end of the course to present them?

“Because cooking is not a chemistry experiment,” Giuliano says with conviction. “I want my students to learn to cook spontaneously and instinctively. We do everything together. We shop and cook and eat and drink together. My goal is for my students to internalize the why as well as the how.”

It’s for that reason that in his influential and widely translated cookbooks—The Classic Pasta Cookbook (1993), Every Night Italian (2000) and How To Cook Italian (2005)—he usually specifies ingredient amounts not by the teaspoon or the cup but as, for example, one medium white onion or two sprigs of parsley.