Peter Marshall is a truffle farmer with an approach perhaps best described as traditional French. He coppices his trees and makes his own bio char, he works without chemicals, and has developed a forest and soil ecosystem that has produced Canberra’s most successful truffle farm. He’s also experimenting with log-grown exotic mushrooms. His other business is making military and outdoor equipment, and his links with the military mean he carries the deeply-felt troubles of too many friends and colleagues irreparably damaged by war.

Carluccio shares Marshall’s love of mushrooms, which were in some sense his entree into the food world. He walked the hills of his Italian home as a child gathering mushrooms, and continued the pastime when he moved, via Vienna and Germany, to London in his late 30s. Mushrooms brought him to Gennaro Contaldo, his offsider on Two Greedy Italians (who now helps Jamie Oliver run his strong of Jamie’s restaurants). Contaldo worked as Carluccio’s mushroom collector for his Neal Street restaurant in London.

Marshall and Carluccio are both keen woodworkers, whittling hazel and other coppiced sticks. Carluccio makes walking sticks and told an audience at the Wolgan Valley resort in the Blue Mountains on the weekend (another story, extraordinary place) that he has a collection of 300 of them, topped with a little mushroom carving on top that is his symbol.

He also talked about his battle with deep depression over many years, including suicide attempts, a depression he came to terms with partly through writing his autobiography, published two years ago.

The idea of inviting Carluccio to Canberra as patron of the truffle festival was Marshall’s. Drawn by the promise of truffle, the loan of Marshall’s best truffle dog, second-best pocket knife and his pick of hazel sticks to whittle, Carluccio, 77, was happy to come for what he says is his "10th or 15th" visit to Australia, usually for food festivals and book tours.

Events kicked off in the Blue Mountains on Saturday July 19, where Carluccio hosted a weekend stay at Emirates Wolgan Valley resort. At a question and answer session there, he told the audience they should all consider putting pen to paper.

“That biography was written mainly for me,” he said of his book. “Because I wanted to know after the ups and downs of my life what my life was really about. And I gained quite a good deal. In fact, I suggest everyone of you should put down on paper bits and pieces, you will wonder how many things are coming out of the different box. And if you think a little bit about that you start to think who am I, why did I do that?”

Carluccio is a larger-than-life figure and a man who endears himself to an audience with his gruff honesty, his dismissiveness towards the world of fancy restaurants and big-name chefs, and his bonhomie. He tells jokes – lots of jokes, as it turns out, and he entertained guests at dinner with jokes both sweet and bawdy. The latter don’t bear repeating, but Carluccio isn’t shy of telling them anyway and we’re treated to one especially confronting joke with which he has apparently also entertained Prince Charles.

The jokes are in Carluccio’s expansive nature. He likes talking to and studying people and lists anthropology as a big hobby, partly expalining his decision to leave Italy as a young man for a wider, less tradition-bound world. “I went away from home because I wanted to be European citizen, I wanted to talk to people I wanted to enlarge my view of things” he says. “… Open yourself to tell how you are to listen how other people are. In this way one should become a better man. I don’t know if I did that but I try.”

But the jokes are also a front, something he admits with typical candour. “I had very good time, I had very bad time as well, with the passion and all that. The jokes that I am telling are just a sort of camouflage because it came in a time when I had very deep depression and I was writing books and I was writing television. And in order to let believe the others I was okay I was telling jokes. … So it remains a little bit,” he says. “The jokes are something that can revive a discussion, and I like the spirit.”

And with that, he launches immediately into another. “Two little prawns, one say to the other 'I am very upset', he said 'Why?' 'Because mumma has gone to a cocktail party and she hasn’t come back.'”

Carluccio was persuaded to Australia partly for the truffles. A devotee of the Italian white truffle where the scent is what you eat more than the flesh, he was interested to see what the new world is doing with the French black truffle. He has high praise for the Marshalls’ truffles, which equal or better the French, and says he has never met a man who talks truffles with as much as understanding as Peter Marshall.

Carluccio’s week at Braidwood is free of engagements, with his public appearances coming on the weekend, July 25-27. He will demonstrate at the Exhibition Park farmers’ market on Saturday and the Fyshwick markets and Three Seeds on Sunday, and has dinners on Friday night at the Kamberra winery function centre and Saturday night at Grazing in Gundaroo.

His approach to food is resolutely simple. The menu he devised at Wolgan Valley began with raw beef, beaten very thin, marinated in a little lemon juice and olive oil and topped with truffle. He served a chilled melon “soup” with prosciutto and truffle, an inside-out version of the classic Italian dish of melon wrapped in prosciutto; then stuffed, breaded lamb cutlets with spinach, and finally a tiramisu for dessert.

This is the kind of food Carluccio likes, minimum of fuss, maximum of flavour, as he puts it. “There is no need for artifice or glamorising if the basics are right,” he writes in his book.

Carluccio, who describes the supermarkets as “a distributor of mediocrity”, urges people to be “discerning”. “If you feed your body with wonderful food, not necessarily too expensive, but good wholesome nicely prepared food, the entire personality improves and has benefit from it," he says.

He claims never to eat in the world’s nominated best restaurants and to have no interest in them. “A good gourmet goes to places where the cuisine is normal but well made, you want to eat well, you don’t want to eat beautiful,” he says, suggesting we leave that to the Japanese where the aesthetics and beauty of what’s on the plate make sense with the cuisine. But not with Euopean food.

Carluccio likes food cooked by a “granny” or “a granny of a granny”, and is pleased to see a trend towards this kind of food and towards regional specialisation. He notes, though, a certain “Pacific rim” experimentation in Australian food, a mixing up of ingredients that doesn’t sit well with him. And don’t get him started on smears and dots.

Carluccio has made a career of food television but remains a little sceptical of the genre. Two Greedy Italians, he says, is not heavily scripted, but he recounts an experience as guest chef on MasterChef, where he found himself at odds with the decision about who was to win the contest he was supposed to be judging. The scene had to be shot again with the correct judging call.

And he warns young wannabes that “TV chef” in itself is not a glorious career aim. Love of food and cooking must come first. “If you are in charge a little bit of what you’re saying and you are transmitting to others the enthusiasm for food, that’s one thing. But if you are in the hand of director or scriptwriter putting on just a show, then I’m afraid it’s not very good because you are just reduced to a little sort of presenter, not really convincing, making laugh or making horrified,” he says.

Carluccio, who had early success in athletics, and worked in wine and other sales jobs before finally entering food by a circuitous road in London in his 40s, says he does give thought to the nature of fame, and to why people spend so much money, as they did at Wolgan Valley on the weekend, to see him. But he says in the end, his approach what he has done is pursue something he believes in.

“I did an incredible amount of jobs when I was young until it crystallised what you are, what are your major desires in life, and I discovered in Vienna when I was a student the sharing of food with others. It is just one of the most important aspects of food. Then I pursued [it] because I see that you can make other people happy. And it’s nice to see smiling faces munching away.”

Kirsten Lawson was a guest of the Emirates Wolgan Valley Resort and Spa. Antonio Carluccio is in Canberra on July 25-27. See trufflefestival.com.au for the full program.

Antonio Carluccio in Canberra

Friday July 25

Fireside Stories with Antonio Carluccio. A six course degustation meal with stories about Carluccio's cooking, childhood and love of food. Kamberra Wine Company (sold out).

Saturday July 26

8.30am-10.30am: Cooking demonstration at the Capital Region Farmers Market at EPICPasta

6.30pm:

Sunday July 27

10.45am-11.45am: Carluccio will tour the Fyshwick marketsPasta

12pm-3pm: watch the cooking class from the viewing platform at 3 Seeds