Rachael Ray reveals why she prefers living in…
Although Rachael Ray calls New York City home, she’s not the most important fan of the Big Apple.
The former Food Network star, who has properties in town, as properly 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 inform 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’ve work, I desire Italy.
“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.”
Ray also selected Italy when she and Cusimano celebrated their twentieth marriage ceremony 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.”
Rachael Ray arrives for a taping of “The Drew Barrymore Show” in New York City on Oct. 15, 2025. BACKGRID
John Cusimano and Rachael Ray attend the 2025 North Shore Animal League America Celebration of Rescue at Tribeca 360 in New York City, on June 12, 2025. Getty Images
In 2021, Ray revealed in her magazine, Rachael Ray In Season, that she’d bought the home in Tuscany the yr 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.”
When she and Cusimano purchased the property, she said he called it a “war zone.” It was two buildings without plumbing or electrical energy, 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 restricted actuality collection called “Rachael Ray’s Italian Dream Home,” detailing some of the renovation course of. Last yr, she started filming a new show, “Rachael Ray in Tuscany,” focusing on Italian delicacies.
Rachael Ray cooks during an event at the Grand Tasting Village in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 22, 2025. WireImage
Rachael Ray and John Cusimano have fun their marriage ceremony in Montalcino, Italy, on Sept. 24, 2005. INFGoff.com
While Ray appears to have no scarcity of reward for Italy, she told The Post in April 2024 about some horrors she’d skilled in New York City.
In one story, she spoke about being mugged outdoors her condominium in Queens when she was youthful, recalling, “He has actually a Glock in his hand and sticks it in my back, and I scream so loud. I believe they heard it in Jersey. … I freaked the flip out, and I believe I scared him more than he scared me.
“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 got here back a second time because he was indignant, and he pushed her down an alleyway but was chased off by a canine 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.
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