About Piero Bonamico

I spent my working life in music. I trained at the Eastman School of Music, conducted choirs for a quarter century — Handel’s Messiah, Mozart’s Requiem, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, a handful of U.S. premieres — and music-directed more than fifty staged musicals from Vermont to Washington, D.C. I sang, too: a tenor on concert and cabaret stages from the Laurie Beechman in New York to Scullers in Boston to the Provincetown Cabaret Festival. I taught voice for decades, sent students off to Eastman, Berklee, and a good share of the conservatories in between, picked up a master’s in voice pedagogy along the way, and co-wrote a collegiate textbook on choral conducting. Then COVID closed the theaters, and when the dust settled, I retired. What came after surprised me: not a smaller life, a wider one.

Here’s the thing a résumé obscures: the polymath was always there. Even inside the music career, I was the one designing the posters, producing the videos, building the websites, writing the grants, and managing the five-year restoration of an old gallery building. Music was the lane; making things was the engine.

Now the lane is gone and the engine runs everything. I write. I cook. I build physical things. I still make music, but for the joy of it now. I shoot and edit video, and I spend serious time with AI. I often say that YouTube — at first — and now YouTube and AI together are an incredible gift to a curious ADHD autodidact. For most of history, “I wonder how that works” was a question you filed away. Now it’s a question you can chase down the same afternoon it occurs to you. This site is the record of the chase.

The conviction underneath all of it: home isn’t just where life happens — home is how life is made. Not as décor, but as work: the choices, systems, rituals, and repairs that turn a place into a life. So the pieces here start with practical subjects — meatballs, boilers, budgets, a stretch of weather — and use them as leverage. A meatball ratio becomes a lesson in tenderness and restraint. A boiler decision becomes a lesson in risk, timing, and comfort. Different topics, same question: what do we do when the world pushes back — and how do we stay humane while we do it?

I’m confident the world will be fine without my opinions on any of it. If something here lands as useful or thought-provoking, that’s a bonus. The real reason I make and write these things is simpler: I want a practice that pulls my attention back toward what’s good — toward the beauty of the world and the people in it — without ignoring the stress, noise, and real problems that make that harder than it should be.

So yes, there will be ranting. It’s fun, and it’s often clarifying. But the goal isn’t cynicism or doom. The goal is to sharpen the picture of what’s right, and to make the world feel a little more inhabitable through small, repeatable ways of seeing and doing.

You won’t find food-porn galleries or hollow hacks here. You’ll find recipes with the reasoning left in, recommendations I’ll stand behind, essays that go where they need to, and projects documented honestly — plainspoken and quietly reverent.