Contini has another life as a broadcaster, campaigner for improving children’s diet and writer of recipe books, but her new book, Dear Olivia, is a departure. It’s a novelised memoir of Mary and Phillip Contini’s ancestors and, as the title suggests, a gift to her daughter Olivia, recounting her great-grandparents’ arrival in Scotland, their struggle to settle and survive, and the tragedies that the second world war and internment brought upon many Scots-Italians.

Mary Contini is clear that their grand parents were economic migrants, fleeing extreme poverty in the small mountaintop Italian village of Fontitune, in the hope of creating a better life for their families. “Every time I’ve gone back I’ve just been in love and felt so at home,” she says. “It’s so beautiful, stunning, but it’s very remote and it was a horrendous lifestyle, impossible, so you can understand why they left. But I think some of them did want to go back.”