Inside Rachael Ray’s ultra-private ‘volatile’ family life with her musician husband

If Rachael had her way, she would live in Italy “as long and as much as I can,” after she achieved her “life’s goal” and bought a home in Tuscany in 2017.

“My family is from Italy, and I’ve always wanted to live in Italy,” she recently told People. “It’s my life’s dream. And I’m in my 50s. I worked my whole life to live there.”

However, Rachael admitted that her husband would rather spend most of his time in NYC, so she often travels back to the Big Apple.

“My husband loves New York, prefers New York,” she said. “And he has a rock ‘n’ roll band, and so he spends a lot of time here. I spend as much time as I can there. We work in both places. I tell John all the time, however much time he wants to spend here, do it.”

Rachael previously revealed that she and John are “both really volatile,” but she considers it “a good thing.” John agreed, adding in an interview with Extra: “It’s like there’s a steam valve; we let it off every once in a while. We don’t let things fester.”

In a separate interview with People, Racheal said: “We have volatile personalities, but we’re both very practical too… John and I didn’t meet until later in life, and didn’t get married until we were almost 40.

“We knew who we were. We’ve always been that way, for 20 years. We don’t take it too much to heart when one person just has to vent or blow up.”

She added: “We’re very good at being quiet also, with each other. We don’t look for there to be constant chatter. And we’re very good with giving each other space to work on our passions.”

On her podcast, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, in November 2024, Rachael said she was “bashed for decades” over her decision not to have children but admitted she and John prefer raising dogs instead.

“They never talk back; they always want to hug you,” she said. “It’s that unconditional love, but it really gets you through dark days. Like for me, if I have the absolute worst day, or I’m sick as a dog — as the expression goes — the thing that makes me feel best is to go home and literally climb into bed under a blanket with my dog.”

Rachael and John now have one dog, Bella Boo Blue, a rescue they adopted in 2020 “from two foster homes in a kill shelter.” Their beloved pit bull, Isaboo, died in May 2020, and Rachael’s first pit bull, Boo, died in 2004.

“I don’t understand folks that are not into having an animal in their lives, because it just makes you happier and better,” she added. “And you have all this love in your life all the time, no matter what.”

Rachael and John lost their home in Lake Luzerne, New York, in August 2020 after a massive fire broke out in the roof, destroying “Fifteen years of memories; 40 years of notebooks, drawings, thoughts, my life’s work,” she revealed on the Rachael Ray Show.

She also told The Hollywood Reporter at the time: “We lost a huge part of the physical evidence that we exist, all of the things we had created – paintings and pictures and music, plus everything we were gifted over the years or collected together as a couple; paintings that were made for us and letters that were written to us.”

The couple got to work and had their home rebuilt, with the work completed in 2021.

Only a year after losing their upstate New York home, Rachael and John suffered another property-related tragedy when their New York City apartment flooded after Hurricane Ida swept through, leaving tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage behind. 

“We had finally just finished the work on making the apartment over. And then, Ida took it out. And I mean, out. Down hard,” she explained to People. “Like, literally every speaker in the ceiling, the fireplace, every seam in the wall…It was like the apartment just literally melted, like in Wicked or something.” 

When a team came to help rebuild the home and make it safe to live in, another disaster occurred. “[The remediation team] comes in. They put up their fans and their humidifiers. And then, they make a hole in the wall and break the main water pipe and flood the entire building down to the first floor, from our apartment on the sixth floor,” she recalled. 

“The people that we were waiting for, the cavalry, burst this pipe and made everything worse. Tell me you would not feel like a kicked can.”

She added: “There are so much worse positions we could be in. I mean, I’m alive. And I do have a roof over my head. And I do have a job.”