italy food essay

Italy’s Food: Traditional Italian Food Recipes

Introduction, food and beverages commonly used, meal patterns and eating customs/habits, diet evaluation, salt, fiber, and fat intake, food for special occasions, cooking methods, additional facts.

Italian cuisine is famous around the world for its delicious and healthy food. It includes thousands of varieties of recipes for different dishes with various ingredients. In Italy, culinary traditions are passed down from generation to generation. One of the features of Italy is the different culinary traditions in each region of the country, which have been formed over the centuries. Italian cuisine occupies one of the first places in terms of the quality and the beneficial properties of the dishes. The distinguishing feature of Italy and its cuisine is in the cooking process and the culture of the meal.

The common Italian foods are pizza, typical appetizers, and desserts of Italian cuisine. Appetizers on the Italian table are mainly various types of cheese and frittata, that is, fried appetizers. Other popular foods are lasagna, minestrone, tortellini, ravioli, risotto, spaghetti and carpaccio. Common beverages in Italy are different sorts of regional wines. Wine production is mainly carried out in the country’s north, where the world-famous Chianti and the slightly less popular Marsala wine are produced. Of course, not only is wine consumed in Italy, but coffee is also widely drunk with meals – espresso, cappuccino, or latte.

It is not customary in Italy to eat in a hurry, so “fast foods” are not popular there. For breakfast in Italy, it is customary to drink natural coffee or latte. Lunch is full of various dishes and includes an appetizer, a first course, a second course, fruit, and the usual coffee. The first course includes pasta, risotto, or vegetable soup, and the second – meat, fish, or cheese with a vegetable side dish. Almost always, lunch and dinner are accompanied by wine and end with a fruit and fennel dessert. Italians often dine out, so the restaurant culture is very developed there.

Italian cuisine is very simple and much lighter than US food since it uses mostly simple ingredients. Italian diet is one of the healthiest and most balanced, and the principles of Italian nutrition underlie the Mediterranean diet (Artese et al., 2021). Italians use wheat bread, not toast bread, which is popular in the US. In general, when compared to the US, the Italian diet is healthier because it contains natural products. Commonly, US cafes and households favor such foods as fast-food, bacon fried in processed oil, sweets, and beverages that contain a high amount of sugar. Dietary restrictions in the Italian diet include fried, oily foods, low-quality bread products, and processed sugars.

An Italian diet contains a high amount of fiber products in its cuisine. Fiber, when eaten excessively, may lead to reduced sugar levels in the blood and flatulence (Ocvirk et al., 2019). Fats also take place in the Italian diet, mostly in olive oil. However, there are not many processed oils in the cuisine, which is beneficial for health. Italians do not usually use too much salt in their dishes since they add more different seasonings. Salt can retain moisture in the human body; that is why it is important to maintain enough amount of salt consumed. Lack of salt can lead to dehydration of the body; in severe cases, hyponatremia can develop with a lack of salt in the body.

The festive menu in Italy differs from the everyday one and includes special dishes for every occasion. For example, on Christmas Eve, fish delights are served on the table: oysters, carpaccio from various seafood, grilled eel or swordfish, sea bream, baked trout, etc. Side dishes of vegetables and potatoes accompany everything. The special occasion meal ends with desserts named Pandoro or Panettone. Yet on Christmas itself, different dishes with meat are served. Various sorts of wines are also served on special occasions and celebrations.

Many dishes of Italian cuisine are prepared with wine, stewed, soaked in wine, and marinated. Most Italian cuisine recipes require minimal heat treatment and a simple preparation method. In this way, one can feel the natural taste of the products. Most commonly, dishes in Italy are boiled, stewed, baked, or smoked. For instance, pasta products are boiled, meat is smoked or stewed, and dishes such as pizza and desserts are baked in ovens. However, cooking methods vary from region to house or even from house to house.

One of the features of Italy is the different culinary traditions in each region of the country, which have been formed over the centuries based on common products in a particular area. Italians prepare very tasty natural ice cream, numbering several dozen types. Many wines are produced in Italy – red, rose, white, dry, semi-dry, carbonated, etc. As a rule, Italians rarely go for a combination of seafood and cheese. In general, they are very zealous about violating the canons of Italian cuisine. However, commonly, true Italian cuisine follows a strict recipe adopted in one region, a city, and sometimes even a family.

In conclusion, Italian cuisine is not only popular around the world for the unique taste of the dishes but also for its healthy approach. The diet is natural and light for the body, including whole products and simple cooking methods. Eating customs and habits in Italy are also special, which can be traced from the common eating trends in the region. Italian cuisine is rich in different types of foods and beverages, which are now beloved by many other countries. Recipes of dishes can vary in different parts of Italy, mostly because of geographical factors. Nevertheless, each dish tends to have some peculiarities in cooking and selection of ingredients.

Artese, M. T., Ciocca, G., & Gagliardi, I. (2021). Analysis of traditional Italian food recipes: Experiments and results. In International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 677-690). Springer, Cham.

Ocvirk, S., Wilson, A. S., Appolonia, C. N., Thomas, T. K., & O’Keefe, S. J. (2019). Fiber, fat, and colorectal cancer: New insight into modifiable dietary risk factors. Current gastroenterology reports , 21 (11), 1-7.

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Buon Appetito: A Reading List on Italian Food

Everything I, an Italian, Thought I Knew About Italian Food is Wrong (Marianna Giusti, Financial Times , March 2023)

This Italian-language podcast , hosted by Alberto Grandi and Daniele Soffiati, also explores the true history of Italian food and aims to separate marketing from truth.

In this fascinating piece, Italian journalist Marianna Giusti aims to uncover the truth about classic Italian dishes like carbonara, tiramisu, and panettone—which are celebrated for their authenticity despite being relatively recent inventions. She speaks with older family members and friends from across Southern Italy, asking about the food they ate as children (lots of beans and potatoes) and how it contrasts with the food on menus today.

Inaccuracies about the origins of Italian food may be considered harmless—if it wasn’t for how gastronationalism influences Italian politics and culture. She cites the example of the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, suggesting that pork-free “welcome tortellini” be added to the menu for the San Petronio feast. What was intended as a gesture of inclusion to communities that don’t eat pork, was slammed by far-right Lega party leader Matteo Salvini. “They’re trying to erase our history, our culture,” he said. To me, food is one of life’s great unifiers. I love to bring people together around food, but just as often, food is used to divide people. This piece made me reconsider what I thought I understood about Italian food and think critically about who and what is welcome at the table.

It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says.

There Is No Such Thing As Italian Food (John Last, Noema , December 2022)

In this provocatively-titled piece, journalist John Last examines how climate change and immigration patterns are changing food in Italy. It examines how ingredients from abroad and the labor of migrants were used to build one of the world’s most loved cuisines. It also cites a study that found that the role of immigrants in Italy’s farming and culinary sectors has been systematically ignored. Italian food is often celebrated for connecting eaters with unadulterated, authentic cuisine. The reality is much more complicated. I enjoyed how this deeply-reported essay challenges ideas of culinary purity and questions who that narrative excludes. I was interested to read how Italy’s microclimates produce regional specialities, and how they will be forced to adapt due to climate change. If you’re curious about the future of Italian cuisine, this is the essay for you! It has also been anthologized in Best American Food Writing 2023 for its examination of how food shapes our culture.

It’s this obsessive focus on the intersection of food and local identity that defines Italy’s culinary culture, one that is at once prized the world over and insular in the extreme. After all, campanilismo might be less charitably translated as “provincialism” — a kind of defensive small-mindedness hostile to outside influence and change.

What the Hole Is Going On? The Very Real, Totally Bizarre Bucatini Shortage of 2020 (Rachel Handler, Grub Street , December 2020)

If you’re interested in the pasta-making process or more pandemic-era pasta content, I recommend Mission Impastable from The Sporkful .

The early months of the pandemic were characterized by lockdowns, widespread anxiety, and a national pasta shortage . In this funny, engaging piece written by the self-described “Bernstein of Bucatini,” I learned why some pasta shapes were especially difficult to find due to production challenges. This piece is an enjoyable, twisty romp that points to the sensual delight of pasta during a dark time.

I’d like to go a step further and praise its innate bounciness and personality. If you boil bucatini for 50 percent of the time the box tells you to, cooking it perfectly al dente, you will experience a textural experience like nothing else you have encountered in your natural life. When cooked correctly, bucatini bites back. It is a responsive noodle. It is a self-aware noodle. In these times, when human social interaction carries with it the possible price of illness, bucatini offers an alternative: a social interaction with a pasta.

America, Pizza Hut, and Me (Jaya Saxena, Eater , March 2016)

I really enjoyed this thoughtful personal essay about a young girl’s obsession with Pizza Hut and the influence of food on her identity. The author questions her intersecting heritage: she’s a mixed kid with an Indian father and a white mother, a New Yorker who craves stuffed crusts in Pizza Hut rather than an “authentic” dollar slice, and a pre-teen who wants to eat “white food” while her family enjoys soupy dal and potatoes flavored with cumin and turmeric. This piece is also a useful primer on the history of Italians in America, tracing the path from “other” to mainstream acceptability.

I was half Indian, half white, and all New Yorker. In simple assimilation calculus, going to Pizza Hut with my Indian grandparents in Fort Lee should have earned me points for eating in real life what the cool kids were eating in commercials. And yet, I was still a New Yorker: My ideal sense of self was white, but worldly, opinionated, and judgmental.

Finding Comfort and Escape in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (A. Cerisse Cohen, Lit Hub , November 2022)

I loved this essay about how the author learned to cook during the pandemic and the comfort she found in the reassuring, authoritative voice of Marcella Hazan. The piece vividly describes the flavors of Italian food (“mellow, gentle, comfortable”) and the solace found in cookbooks at a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Before learning to cook, the author considered it a domestic task inextricably linked with traditional notions of femininity and heterosexual marriage. But Hazan, who is widely considered to be the doyenne of Italian cuisine, teaches her that cooking for herself and her chosen family is an essential element of survival, not only literally but existentially. This essay brought me back to the early days of 2020. As the pandemic spiraled out of control, I found my equilibrium through brisk morning walks and the comfort of a pot bubbling on the stove. I still cook most days. Sometimes, it’s a pleasure. More often, it’s a chore. For me, this beautiful essay evoked the visceral, bodily demands of appetite and how satiating them can provide not just culinary satisfaction, but a feeling of peace and wellbeing.

Hazan helped me see that nourishing oneself, and sharing a family meal, is simply foundational. To privilege invention and labor outside the kitchen, but not inside it, is to play into patriarchal distinctions of value. Hazan herself was a cook, an educator, and an incredible creative success. She remains influential for many contemporary cooks. Her adoration of the anchovy—“Of all the ingredients used in Italian cooking, none produces headier flavor than anchovies. It is an exceptionally adaptable flavor”—foreshadows the long reign of Alison Roman. Her careful ideas about layering flavors and her scientific approach to the kitchen find their echoes in the methodologies of Samin Nosrat (who, in her blurb for the new book, also credits Hazan with beginning her obsession with the bay leaf).

Eating the Arab Roots of Sicilian Cuisine (Adam Leith Gollner, Saveur , March 2016)

If you’d like to continue your study of Sicilian cuisine and perhaps try a recipe, you might enjoy this Salon piece about the author’s love of oily fish, simple pasta, and bright flavors.

My partner and I recently returned from a holiday in Sicily. The island is considered to be a melting pot of North African, Arab, French, Spanish, and other cultures—which for me, was best understood through the food. We enjoyed regional delicacies like deep-fried lasagne, cookies made with beef and chocolate, and cremolata, a sherbet-like dessert that originated in Arab cuisine. It was a delight to remember the trip while reading this mouth-watering travel essay which aims to disentangle how Italian and Arab culinary history mixes on the island. What begins as an academic question quickly becomes a catalog of exquisite meals as the author explores the island’s rich, colonial past through its food. He traces the ingredients that are core to Italian cuisine—including the durum wheat used to make pasta—to migrants who arrived on Sicily’s shores and “gifted this land with what’s sometimes known as Cucina Arabo-Siculo.”

Sicily has had so many conquerors, and there’s simply no way to pull apart all the intermingling strands of culture in order to ascertain what is precisely “Italian” and what’s “Arab” and what’s not anything of the kind. At a certain point—ideally sometime after having a homemade seafood couscous lunch in Ortigia and sampling the life-changing pistachio ice cream at Caffetteria Luca in Bronte—you have to give up trying to isolate the various influences and accept that countless aspects of life in Sicily have been informed by Arab culture in some way. It’s deep and apparent and meaningful, but it’s also a cloud of influence as dense and intangible as the lemon gelato sky that greeted me upon my arrival.

Clare Egan is a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes about food (among other things) for her newsletter and is working on her first book.

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Life in Italy, Italian Language, Italian Culture, Italy News, Tourism News, Italian Food

The History of Italian Cuisine I

It is easy to love good food , and we Italians know a couple of things about it. When you enjoy cooking, you become acquainted with ingredients and flavors with a pleasurable delight. You get to know how they mix with each other, which type of scent their fragrance produces, and how they will taste once they touch your tongue. Ah… food : like poetry and painting, it’s impossible to resist the beauty, forms, and colors it creates when it’s spread out on a table and, of course, it’s even harder to refrain from tasting it. In this article, we’re going to review the history of Italian cuisine from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages.

The History of Italian Cuisine

When you love food, there are two things you really want to do: eat it and make it. That’s why it’s nice to have a well-furnished kitchen, and plenty of interesting recipes to try, as well as a gang of good friends, to invite over to justify your spending every single weekend surrounded by pots and pans, making your best impression of a domestic goddess/god.

But you know what, there’s something we barely stop thinking about when in the kitchen, the history behind what we’re making and eating. Have you ever thought of it? You guys, on the other side of the pond, are usually more aware of it, as your cuisine is a delicious melting pot of flavors and cultures hailing from every corner of the Earth, the heritage and history of which is usually well rooted into the community.

In Italy, things are a bit different: we usually care deeply and lovingly about our family’s cooking history. Grandmas and moms’ recipes are passed on with care and pride, a symbol itself of one’s own heritage and roots. Some of us are more aware than others of regional characteristics typical of each dish. It is not usual though, when it comes to the kitchen, to look further back than a couple of generations. Our knowledge of why we cook in a certain way and why we eat certain things is normally based on oral sources (our elders) and therefore has a limited time span.

The history of Italian cuisine , however, is as long and rich as the country’s history itself, its origins laying deep into the ancestral history of Rome, its people, and its political, cultural, and social power. Italian cuisine has evolved and changed following the evolution and the changes of Italy itself throughout centuries of wars, cultural mutations, and contacts: it’s a history as rich, colorful, and fascinating as the most amazing of recipes.

This is what we’re going to tell you today: a tale of food, traditions, kings and warriors, the centuries-long tale of Italian kitchens . The history of Italian cuisine.

The Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages

Our ancestors, the Romans , loved feasting on food: the banquet was not simply a moment of social conviviality, but also the place where new dishes were served and tried. The Empire embraced the flavors and ingredients of many of the lands it had conquered: spices from the Middle East, fish from the shores of the Mediterranea, and cereals from the fertile plains of North Africa; Imperial Rome was the ultimate fusion cuisine hot spot. The Romans, though, contrarily to how we’re today, liked complex, intricated flavors and their dishes often required sophisticated preparation techniques. Ostrich meat, fish sauces, roasted game, all watered by liters of red wine mixed with honey and water, never failed to appear on the table of Rome’s rich and famous.

Of course: we’re talking about the jet-set here, certainly not about the majority of people, who very much, on the other hand, based their diet on the simple union of three things (and the products made of them): the vine, the olive, and cereals. This was called Mediterranean Triad and is still today considered central to the diet known worldwide as the Mediterranean diet . Wine, olive oil, and bread, then, plus healthy helpings of vegetables, legumes, and cheese: this is what the people of Rome would eat on daily basis.

The coming of the Barbarians in the peninsula didn’t only cause the end of the Roman Empire, but also that of such a tradition of, let us say, banqueting in style: this rugged-looking, harsh-speaking people from central and northern Europe had very little in common with Romans and their lifestyle.

As it always happens when cultures meet and clash, the two influenced each other, also in the kitchen: the Barbarians (who, as a matter of fact, ended up being the last straw needed to provoke the fatal collapse of the Empire, but who embraced with pure eagerness all that was Roman culturally, spiritually and socially) introduced the consumption of butter and beer, whereas the Romans passed on to them a taste for wine and olive oil.

History of Italian cuisine – the Middle Ages

Different was the culinary passage into the Middle Ages of Sicily which, since the 9 th century, had become an Arabic colony : islanders embraced the exotic habits and tastes of their colonizers, a fact mirrored also in their cuisine. Spices and dried fruit became a common concoction and are still often found in Sicilian dishes. Many may not know that dried pasta, today a quintessentially Italian thing, was brought to the country, specifically to Sicily, by the Arabs, who appreciated the fact it was easy to carry and preserve, hence perfect for long sea trips and sieges. From the ports of Sicily, dried pasta made its way to those of Naples and Genoa, as well as France and Spain. So, contrary to what we hear often when talking about the history of pasta , it wasn’t Marco Polo that brought noodles to Italian shores. This is how, we can truly say, an Italian legend was born.

It wasn’t only the influence of other populations to change and influence the Italian way of cooking and eating in the early centuries of the Middle Ages , but also that of religion. After Constantine declared Christianity a legal religion of the Empire and especially after it became the sole Imperial religion with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, under the reign of emperor Theodosius I, Christianity began exercising heavy regulations upon people’s behaviors and habits , including the way they ate.

Food and eating were strongly associated with sin and with sexuality: pride, of course, was Adam and Eve’s sin, but it did manifest itself through the acts of a woman, who ate the forbidden fruit. As a consequence, spiritual perfection could be obtained through abstinence and fasting and, in particular, through renunciation to meat consumption.

Very much up to the year 1000, the monks of Italy (and of the whole of Europe, as a matter of fact) ate a strict diet of bread and legumes, with very spare additions of cheese and eggs on allowed days, along with some seasonal fruit . The meat was considered a dangerous aliment not only for its symbolic meaning: it was refused as food both because its production involved an act of blatant violence, the killing of an animal, but also because it was considered an energetic food, which could provoke in its consumer’s unclean desires and passions. In other words, Medieval Christians thought, meat could make you lose your chastity more easily than salad.

Roman banquets and the Barbarians’ habit to eat meat continuously on one side, Christian restrain of the other: the duality came to an end when Charlemagne managed to reconcile the two by declaring righteous an alternation of ascetic fasting with days of pleasurable feasting when even religious authorities and the faithful could give in to the pleasures of the table and consider it an offering to the greatness and goodness of God.

During these days of the feast, food became one and only with celebrating and honoring the Lord, just as fasting and restrictions did during the rest of the week. Monasteries slowly but steadily abandoned those strict ascetic regulations that had characterized them up to that point and opened to the flavors and tastes of good food on special occasions, which also became moments of prayer and reflection.

And what about castles and their inhabitants? What did they eat in the early Middle Ages? Let’s have a look into that side of the history of Italian cuisine!

Early middle ages as society

The social structure built around the castle and its lord had become, by the 11 th century, organized in an autarchic economical system which allowed most of its members (craftsmen, members of the military, servants, peasants) to eat regularly and with relative ease. The lord of the castle, of course, was the one with the fuller stomach, but even to him and his family, food was far from being a gastronomic matter: up to when living in the cities flourished again, in Italy before than everywhere else, and people’s mores became, once again, more refined, medieval banqueting remained closer to barbaric food feasts than to old, lavish and harmonious Roman banquets.

The later Middle Ages and the Renaissance

In the later Middle Ages, town life blossomed again with the development of the comuni culture: this supported the inception of early productive cores upon which a whole new social class was to found its roots: the bourgeoisie . Craftsmen were hit by higher demands, dictated by the higher number of people living in urban areas, as well as by a steep increase in commerce, both within and without the borders of Italy as we know it today.

The Crusades had opened up Europe to the idea of communicating with one’s neighbor and products began to circulate with much ease: a new social class, that of merchants was born. It is, then, among this crafts and commerce crowd that the pleasure of good food became, once again, a symbol of social and economic status . Cooking returned to be a matter of enjoyment and refinement, a voyage among flavors and combinations. Meats and vegetables were once again roasted and braised, the old art of stewing and dressing dishes in rich, flavorsome sauces was rediscovered.

The lords of the castle were going that extra mile to make things even more flamboyant, and embraced with flair the old imperial habit to present food and dishes on the plate spectacularly: birds were served decorated with their own feathers as if they were still living, pork was brought onto the table with its head still attached to the body, surrounded by pounds and pounds of sides.

Such a rediscovery of old, traditional ideas in the kitchen, coincided with the introduction of new culinary elements especially on the lords’ table: spices and cane sugar, introduced to Italy by the Arabs and grown in Sicily, substituted salt, pepper, or honey in many a dish and helped to create new flavors and recipes. It is, for instance, during the 13 th century that sugared almonds (called confetti in Italy) were created and usually served as a sign of culinary distinction at the end of very important dinners: of course, we’re talking about modern confetti, covered with a delicious sugar shell here, but the idea of having almonds or even aniseeds covered in a sweet shell was common already in Roman times. However, the Romans didn’t know sugar, so they would use a paste of honey and flour instead.

In general, almonds preparations became very popular, especially thanks to Sicilian cuisine and its love for Arabic flavors: it was in Sicily, for instance, that the Arabs introduced an ancestor of marzipan, which was to become a very popular medieval dessert. What many don’t know is that, very probably, the most famous of all Sicilian dessert , the cassata, may have Arabic origins, too. The cake, made with sheep ricotta mixed with sugar, sponge cake, royal paste (a sweet paste made of almond flour and sugar) and candied fruit, was created during the Arab domination of island, between the 9 th and the 11 th century.

Arabs had introduced sugar cane, lemons, and oranges to the cultures of Sicily and very soon they all became part of its cuisine: all these ingredients concurred, along with sheep ricotta, always produced in the South of Italy, and almonds, to create the cassata. Even its name may come from the Arabic word qas’at , which means “small basket,” and could indicate the container where the cake was made. However, other linguists think the name actually comes from the Latin caseum , which means “cheese.”

Either way, the roots of the dish itself are certainly Middle Eastern, even though it changed greatly throughout the centuries: for instance, the pasta di mandorle – a paste made with almond flour and sugar, which is an ingredient of marzipan – began to be used only during the Norman period to cover cassate . Before then, they were encased in shortbread.

Some place the origin of another delicious Italian sweet treat in the same period, and at the hand of the same people, the Arabs: it seems, in fact, that the history of gelato , the world famous Italian-style ice cream, is very much rooted on Sicilian soil and in Arabic culinary tradition. The Arabs commonly produced a sorbet-like concoction of sugar and fruit juices, turned into ice by keeping it immersed in a mixture of ice and salt.

They exported the method in Sicily, where fruits were plenty, marine salt local produce, and ice came easily from the peaks of Mount Etna . Even though gelato as we know it became a fixture of European tables only in the 1600s, thanks to the popularity it reached in France, Arabic Sicily wins the medal for having been the first place in the western world where its ancestor was produced.

The history of Italian cuisine and food is still long and fascinating. Get to learn more about what Italy inherited from the New World and the evolution of the Italian way of cooking up to modern times in the second part of our adventure in the history of Italian food .

History of Italian food part 2

History of Italian Food part 3

History of Italian food part 4

Actually Etruscans already had pasta so…

Hi I always heard of “Amari” ( Bitter liqueur drink ) made by Monaci ( Monks ) and Frati but I will ask Francesca about Food recipes, she will know more than I do

Were there any medieval monks famous for cooking or cook books?

L’Italia e stata e sara’ sempre alla vanguardia della cultura. Viva L’Italia!

In response to Ventura who said (on Oct 2, 2019): “Italy is only 100 years old. How are you tracing Italian food back centuries.” The Italian NATION came into political existence approximately 150 years ago, after the wars of unification. BUT the italian culture is ancient, as are the foods, recipes and agriculture which produces the foods. I took three different university courses on italian food (NOT cooking, but history and culture). They had sophisticated cookbooks even in the 1400s and some still producing olive trees are 1,000 yrs old. So, Ventura, you can’t say that the political NATION determines how old a culture is, and that includes its foods.

The Roman legions grew wheat for their pasta……….long before Marco Polo. Catherine de Medici brought her chefs to France AND THAT IS WHEN THEY DISCOVERED HOW TO COOK! In Bath you can see the BATHS…….the Romans were CLEAN………and you can see the latrines they constructed of marble with a unique FLUSH of wast in Provence. FRANCE IS 100 YEARS OLD! HA HA.

Hello Rob, the tomato came later, with the discovery of America, as you mention. It’s on the second part of this article: https://www.lifeinitaly.com/history-of-food/the-history-of-italian-cuisine-ii

All that and not one mention of the tomato which is central in many dishes. They came from Mesoamerica after the Conquest. The word itself is Nahuatl, “tomatl”. What would Italian food be without the tomato?

Viva la Italiano!

Not true my friend the French have always been behind in Italian culture. Several years back the NYT had an article based on the power Italians have on fashion, food and the people themselves no comparison. The article gave credit to the French for their perfumy claiming they need it for their body oder. Italians have it all locked down oh did I mention looks also!!

Italy is only 100 years old. How are you tracing Italian food back centuries.

Thank God I was born in an italian family,the best food in the world. 🍷

The French taught the italiansvhow to make great food

Molto interessante. Very interesting. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Looking forward to reading the other parts.

Grazie mille!

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History of food.

In Italian Food, What's Authentic and Does It Really Even Matter?

Italians are passionate about their food culture, but the ingredients we eat and how we eat them are constantly evolving and changing over time.

I pride myself on having a profound understanding of what Italian food is and what makes it authentic. I know the difference between carciofi alla giudea , twice-fried artichokes in the style of the Roman ghetto, and carciofi alla romana , braised artichokes with garlic and mint in the style of Rome. I know that acqua cotta , one of the classics of Tuscan cooking, comes in at least three radically different versions depending on what part of Tuscany you are in. I know that even if an Italian would never sprinkle grated Parmigiano over his shellfish pasta, he would happily eat crostini with melted mozzarella and anchovies. I know that asparagus and tomatoes are not cooked together, because wherever you are on the boot they are not in season together. I know that long cooking of vegetables is a hallmark of Italian food wherever you are: no barely blanched green beans or asparagus for Italians, please!

I believe that my understanding of the flavor combination of fresh mozzarella, sun-ripened tomatoes, basil, and olive oil is a foundation that can steer me to many plates beyond the simple classic insalata Caprese I first ate, still sticky with salt from a morning in the water, at a beach-side restaurant in Capri. I laugh to myself at the many ridiculous combinations I come across outside of Italy, knowing that nobody with any understanding of Italian food would ever combine nettle-ricotta ravioli with puttanesca sauce.

And yet, I ask myself, what is authenticity and does it really matter? Italians are, of course, passionate about their food culture and ready at all times to chastise a foreigner for not understanding that right combinations or sequences of flavors. Salad always comes after the entrée -- never before. Pasta and soup fill the same slot in the meal, so you eat one or the other and not both. Plum tomatoes are for pasta sauce, globe tomatoes are for salad. And so it goes, a dizzying array of rules and regulations for how you eat. But still I wonder, what is the importance of authenticity?

Italian food and flavors changed dramatically after 1492 with the influx of the New World fruits and vegetables -- tomatoes, corn, beans, peppers, potatoes -- that were gradually integrated over four centuries of gardening and cooking and are at the core of today's version of Italian food. If we wanted to be really authentic with Italian food, shouldn't we do away with all the invasive species? Doesn't that make tomato sauce and polenta inauthentic?

Food is not static. What we eat is constantly evolving and changing. New things become available. When I was a child in Rome, cilantro, limes, and yams were unknown and unavailable; today, thanks to immigration and the global produce trade, you can probably find all three at the corner vegetable stand. When I first started paying attention to my neighbors' farm in Tuscany, they were extremely self-sufficient in terms of their food. They grew, raised, and foraged probably 90 percent of what they consumed. Their food and flavors were delicious and unvarying, and the dishes Mita cooked formed the basis of my understanding of Italian food.

And yet as the times changed and they began to watch television and shop for some food at the supermarket, variances drifted in. One year we had pasta with a canned truffle and cream sauce. Another Easter my mother was surprised by violets in the salad. "I saw it on TV," Mita said. Is it inauthentic to be inspired by new ingredients? Is it inauthentic to take the combination of insalata Caprese and manipulate the ingredients until they no longer resemble mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil but the flavor combination remains the same?

I cringe when Americans do strange things to classic Italian food: Spaghetti and meatballs has me running out the door with an excuse about my house burning down. Yet while I have never seen spaghetti and meatballs on a menu in Italy, I have seen plenty of fresh-off-the-boat Italian chefs appropriate the dish and add it to their repertoire.

Much as Italian food was changed by the discovery of the Americas and recently by immigration and a global market, Italian immigrants who came to America 100 years ago were influenced by the new ingredients and the lack of availability of ingredients that were common back home. Is it inauthentic to use Vietnamese fish sauce when we are pretty sure that 2,000 years ago the ancient Romans made and consumed fish sauce themselves?

As a chef who has tied my career to cooking "authentic" Italian food, who prides herself on knowledge of what is proper Italian and what is not, I have been amazed and intrigued at what Italians make their own. Years ago in Puglia I ate in a little tiny restaurant that prided itself on everything coming from the garden out back or the farm down the road. The different cheeses we ate were described as yesterday's cheese and last month's cheese. But when I went back the next day to cook with them, I was amazed to find them happily using Kraft singles in their eggplant Parmesan. I thought I had misheard or misseen, but no, they really were using Kraft singles without any sense of destroying the authenticity of their food.

Recently, I had an Italian chef in my kitchen who requested Worcestershire and Tabasco to put in her tomato sauce. Is that inauthentic? Or is it simply adapting in the same way that people adapted new products like corn to their traditional dishes of grain gruel made with millet, barley, or farro? Do I really care if someone sprinkles mint over fried artichokes? It actually sounds good. I have found the combination of soy sauce and extra virgin olive oil to be delicious. Is that a bad thing? It's certainly inauthentic right now, but will it be considered a standard element in Italian cuisine 50 years from now?

I think that as a non-native Italian it has been tremendously important to me to define my understanding of the cuisine as an understanding of the traditions that go into the food. It becomes terrifically important to be able to say "I might not have an Italian name or been born in Italy, but my ability to know and cook what is authentic means I am just as Italian as Luciano Pavarotti." I do believe that often there is a reason behind many of the dishes we love and cherish and revere as authentic to us. And I do believe you have to really understand the classics in anything to start rearranging them. But food is not static, and our tastes are not static. And perhaps if I was Italian to the bone I would feel freer to add Worcestershire sauce to my tomato sauce. Maybe I would roast sweet potatoes with rosemary and garlic and not think twice about it.

When I taste traditional French food with its flour-thickened, rich, long-cooked sauces, I don't enjoy it. It tastes old and stale and boring. I don't agree that innovation for the sake of innovation is necessarily a good thing, and I don't enjoy molecular gastronomy necessarily any more than I do classic haute cuisine French food of the 1950s. But for me a truly confident chef is able and eager to appropriate new ingredients and techniques. Things change, our palates change and what was new today may become the tradition of tomorrow -- a tradition so ensconced that the minute you think of that cuisine you think of the dish, the way pasta with New World tomato sauce or New World polenta immediately makes you think of Italy.

Image: Petrafler/ Shutterstock .

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The History of Italian Cuisine: Delicacies and Traditions

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The Culture of Italian Food Essay Example

The culture of Italian food stretches back to the origins of the Roman Empire. The majority of their ingredients came from a land far away which they have conquered. A predominantly Mediterranean diet was the main food consumed. By the first century, chronicles began preserving Roman recipes of what was being eaten and how they were prepared. This ushered in the new period known as the Middle Ages, where new groups of people took charge and brought with them different types of spices, fruits, methods of cooking, and diets based on following their religion. It was during the Renaissance rebirth that a multitude of foods from all over the world was imported into Italy. Italian cuisine evolved using these new ingredients, creating both new and changing old recipes as they found their way into various regions. Eventually, the food shared as recipes, at festivals, with friends and relatives, became part of the rest of the world. Now, one can discover and try a taste, an exotic variation of distinctive flavors.

The importance of food was vital to life as well as its respect in all ways. Health was a concern of the people who chose to stick to a Mediterranean diet. This is a diet that contains vegetables, spices, olive oil, herbs, and others, which gives nourishment to the body during holidays like Saint Day and on an everyday basis. In contrast, for other holidays like Christmas, families tend to eat light since on Christmast they eat heavy foods such as pasta, meat, etc. others. It is usually mom who cooks in Italian culture since she takes great pride in her food, using ingredients from ancestors or making sure to use the freshest vegetables and herbs in a particular area, making the food taste particularly good. The things mom used were pasta, meat, olive oil, and sauce. Several-course meals are traditionally shared with the family since dried vegetables and cheese are both consumed. They would then have pasta and cheese before continuing with meat or seafood, such as fish, and then drink coffee and wine. Another important part of culture is lunchtime. During lunchtime, people can spend an hour eating at home. By cooking at home, it allows people to have a healthier diet because they're providing the family with healthy options. In this culture, people experience less unemployment as food provides energy, so they stay healthy and are more productive at work.

The country is full of flavors, tastes, and the quality of the different regions. Different varieties of food are seen to be eaten in each region because of access and what grows. Due to the climate, the soil, and the ingredients grown in the place, each region has a different blend of ingredients, and the locals would be required to incorporate their traditions into new recipes that combine fresh ingredients to make something delicious. A great variety of herbs and spices are used in all regions of the world, and there is a great deal of fish in the dishes. Typically, Italians cook simple dishes well known to their country, which is important because they're looking to capture the taste and all the flavors of a few quality ingredients to make a great meal. Food is their passion, as everything becomes simple when they cook. The effort and time to create something beautiful with lots of colors are evident in their cooking. Along with the food being cooked for a short time, a good meal can also be enjoyed for a few hours between breaks when families gather to share their experiences and reconnect with old memories. Ingredients can be an important part of Italian cultures such as olive oil, pasta, and wine. Olive oil was considered a source used to substitute fat from animals or even butter because it was considered healthier than a Mediterranean diet used in sauces, pasta, meat, and seafood. Pasta is considered a separate course usually eaten with just sauce. Considered an important part of the culture which is shared throughout Italy which was influenced by a product brought back by Marco Polo which was soon slowly eaten made out of durum wheat. This food comes in lots of varieties where each region eats pasta in its own style where people love to enjoy it slowly because of all the different tastes and flavors combined.

It is said that the Italian and American food cultures are very different because the Italian food culture is about sharing simple ingredients with family and friends while the American food culture is about comfort foods that are not healthy. Fresh ingredients in season and those that are local to the region are what Italians eat because they tend to have more flavor and are tastier. Freshly grown fruits and vegetables are sold at farmer markets. Breakfast is considered to be a light meal similar to a snack. During lunch and dinner, they eat multiple courses and eat them in small portions so that they can digest everything properly. The weekends are a time for eating at home with others and interacting where few people go out. The food in America is also influenced by the cultures of the different countries and the territories they once occupied. A quarter of the people eat fast food each day here. People here enjoy fast food. American cheeses, meats, and sugar are the major foods consumed by Americans. As convenient as eating out at restaurants, ready-made food is just as convenient, considering nobody enjoys cooking since it takes a lot of time and would be very difficult given that they're classless and never learned to cook from their parents. Assuming individuals are paying for a meal, they want larger portions As for other countries, foods can be expensive so taking the family out to eat will cost more than they expected. This is similar to how 90 percent of Italians eat at home on Sunday. Americans dislike breakfast most because it is a time-consuming meal, and they are always busy doing other things so they take out time to eat. During lunch, people are rushed because there is little time to eat, so they usually eat sandwiches and salads, and whatever they don't finish gets thrown away because they don't have time and the price is cheap so nobody wastes anything. It is not uncommon for many families to not have a good relationship where no one communicates with each other at dinner time. As seen health is never questioned when taking good care of yourself because the cost will be too much to worry about making the best choice of what to put in your body as others feel they have been doing what is right all the time without knowing the bad stuff.

The Italian food culture has always stuck to the true quality of simplicity using what you got with a few requirements to make a meal. Different cultures' influences on the Italian food has made the food eaten very unique with different dishes in each region all using local products to create their own traditional meals. These can be shared at festivals or with family to create memories with those who like good food as others.

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How Italy blends culture with cuisine - a photo essay

Photographer Harriet Zawedde was born in Rome but raised in the UK. Her series Nightshade, combines portraits with botanical images of the tomato plant and the subjects’ recipes

T he English word tomato derives from the Aztec word tomatl . It is believed the Aztecs and Incas were cultivating and eating the tomato from 700AD. Though the tomato originated from the Andean region, it eventually spread north to Mexico. The scientific name for the tomato is solanum lycoperscicum .

While the Spanish were responsible for bringing the tomato to Europe in the early 16th century, its first reference in Italy was in 1544 in Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s Herbal, who refers to the tomato as pomi d’oro meaning golden apple. The tomato was not used in cooking until the 18th century as it was often viewed with fear and suspicion as a member of the nightshade plant family, which had plants such as the mandrake among them.

Once the names the tomato were called were amended and confusion and ambiguity as to what it was subsided, it was able to illustrate its full potential. After its family ties became less relevant and it was allowed to exist for what it was, not how it looked, it thrived. This took an element of trust.

Below, Nightshade’s subjects discuss their favourite recipes.

I can tell you, lasagna is the first dish I learned to cook. I moved out from my parents’ house without knowing how to cook even a common pasta but since lasagna and pollo con patate, are my favourite dishes, I learned how to cook them first. Even though making the ragu isn’t so easy. I tried my best and my lasagna is one of the best in town, if you get in Brianza by any chance, you’ve got to taste it.

Evelyne’s lasagna Ingredients: Egg lasagna | Passata | Celery | Carrots | Onions | Mince | Parmesan | Olive oil | Homemade béchamel | Salt | Pepper | Basil Fry the onion until softened. Add the carrot and cook for five minutes, then add the celery and cook for another two minutes. Turn up the heat, add the chopped beef and cook until browned all over. Make a ragu over an afternoon, pour in the wine and passata, season with salt, pepper and a pinch of grated nutmeg, then bring to a simmer. Make your own béchamel. Place cooked ragu into an overproof dish and layer. Top with parmesan. Garnish with basil.

This is a classic Italian recipe. If you ever jump on a plane to Italy , don’t miss it.

Since I was a child, this has been my favourite recipe. I remember cooking it for every family party, even for my sister’s wedding. With this recipe you will never go too far wrong. Your guests will love Crostata. This recipe is a mix of authentic Italian flavours, in which lemon and marmellata (jam) are the main ingredients for a unique and refined taste.

Good luck and enjoy!

Claudia’s crostata alla marmellata Ingredients: 250g cold butter from the fridge | 200g of icing sugar | 500g of 00 flour | 2 eggs | The rind of an untreated lemon | 400g of jam | Enough milk to brush the surface | A pinch of salt Put the flour, butter and a pinch of salt in the mixer. Mix in order to obtain an uneven sandblasting. Add the eggs, icing sugar and lemon peel to flavour the pastry and allow the citric acid to make it crumbly. Knead the dough before putting it onto a work surface. Start working it with the fingertips, to create a nice compact dough. Wrap it in clingfilm and let it rest for 30 minutes in the fridge, or ideally overnight. After letting the dough rest, we heat it and flatten it. Aim for a thickness of 7/8mm. Transfer the dough into a 24cm diameter cake pan and pinch the bottom with a fork. Then we make our short pastry with jam, we distribute it on the edge. After that, prepare 3 or 4cm strips of dough and place on to the jam, applying pressure to the edges. Lay the strips diagonally creating a grid of pastry and diamond shapes of jam. To make the tart shiny, brush the milk on the pastry with a pastry brush. After that, we bake the tart in a pre-heated oven at 170C for 50 minutes.

Fiorentina is one of the most popular and biggest steak in Italian cuisine.

I have eaten this more than three times and its taste was undeniable. I think it is one of the best dishes that I often have because it reminds me of Tuscany’s fabulous and iconic lifestyle.

Simon’s fiorentina

Ingredients: T-bone steak | Salt | Pepper (coal fire) Use the highest quality steak, ideally Tuscan or Italian. Cook on an open fire if possible (on the embers of the grill). Rare or medium rare only. Garnish with salt and pepper.

Pizza has always been a reason to gather with my friends. Pizzerias were fancy enough for our student pockets. When my mum would make pizza at home, we were always very excited.

For me, it was nice to see the first generation of immigrants learning the Italian cooking as their way of integration.

Abigail’s pizza al prosciutto e funghi Ingredients: Semolina pizza dough | tablespoon olive oil | 2 cloves chopped garlic | 5 mushrooms thinly sliced | mozzarella cheese | 1 can tomatoes | chopped roma | 1 bell pepper| thinly sliced prosciutto | salt & pepper to taste | oregano | pepper flakes Preheat oven to its hottest setting for 45 minutes. With about 1 teaspoon olive oil, sauté the sliced mushrooms and a pinch of salt over medium heat for 5-10 minutes, until well browned. Set aside. Sprinkle semolina on your baking sheet. Place the dough on top of the semolina and roll out into a circular shape. Brush the outer edges with olive oil and chopped garlic. Spread chopped tomatoes from the centre out to the edge of the oiled crust. Evenly place your toppings (mushrooms, mozzarella, bell pepper, etc) on the dough. Sprinkle with salt, Italian seasoning and pepper flakes, to taste. Add Parmesan cheese if desired. Transfer the pizza onto your stone by sliding it off the baking sheet. Bake for 10+ minutes, or until the crust is nicely browned and the cheese is bubbly. Remove with tongs and let rest for five minutes.

I usually cook it during summer for lunch, after a long morning at the beach. It is easy, quick and everyone loves it, including my kids. The pepper is not that hot. It is a plate that I particularly love because I buy the shrimps fresh from the local fish store near the beach.

Nadege’s pasta con gamberoni, peperoncino e pangrattato Ingredients: Shrimps from Marsala Tomatoes from pachino | 300g spaghetti | Olive oil | Garlic | Hot pepper | Salt In a frying pan add some oil, garlic and hot pepper then mix all together until the mixture becomes a little golden. In the meantime, boil some water for the pasta. Add two or three tablespoons of the boiling water into the mixture. Then let it sit for a couple of minutes until the pasta is cooked. Add salt and pepper. Mix everything together.

Aubergines are my all-time favourite late summer/winter vegetable. This dish reminds me of childhood, having a family meal at a local tavola calda. It can be eaten as a standalone dish or as part of a secondo piatto. It’s one of the most unassuming yet deliciously hearty dishes. I’ve probably adulterated the dish to suit my palette but this is a firm favourite for me to prepare for my nearest and dearest. If you want a leaner version of this dish, try grilling the aubergines instead. An exceptionally tasty vegetarian treat.

Tiwonge’s melanzane alla parmigiana Ingredients: 3 large aubergines | 1 bottle of tomato passata | 2 cloves of garlic 2 balls of mozzarella | 1 cup of parmigiano reggiano (grated) | 1 cup of extra virgin olive oil | 1 cup flour | 1 cup vegetable oil | Black pepper to taste | Fresh basil to taste | Salt to taste Preheat oven to 180C (356F). Slice aubergines lengthways but leave skin on. Place in a bowl and sprinkle two tablespoons of salt over them and leave for an hour to remove the moisture. In the meantime prepare the sauce. Add two teaspoons of olive oil to a pan and finely chop garlic cloves. Fry until softened. Add passata and cook on medium heat on hob for 15 minutes. Tear and add fresh basil and black pepper and salt. Cook for a further 10 minutes. Chop mozzarella into small cubes. Place flour into a bowl. Take aubergines out of salt and coat each in the flour. Prepare a new pan with two tablespoons vegetable oil and fry off flour coated aubergines- about 1-2 minutes each side. Place on kitchen towel to absorb oil. Add more cooking oil to pan if required.Prepare an oven baking dish. Start by spoon- ing some of the passata onto the base. Then place a layer of aubergines on top, add some passata, parmesan and mozzarella. Repeat until all ingredients have been used. Bake for 25-30 minutes. Serve with a sprig of basil and enjoy this heart-warming beautiful dish.

This is a classic Italian antipasto. It is the perfect dish for when you invite your friend for dinner because it is easy to make and very tasty.

Bintou’s caprese Ingredients: Mozzarella | Tomato | Extra virgin olive oil | Oregano | Salt | Pepper Slice mozzarella and tomato and place on plate. Apply a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil. Season with salt, pepper and fresh oregano.

This dish reminds me of the long summers in my childhood, and I used to enjoy this on a picnic or by the beach. It brings memories of laughs, sun, water, running barefoot in the hot sand, beach games and the joy of eating all together.

Cinzia’s pomodori di riso alla romana Ingredients: 4-5 medium firm ripe round tomatoes seeded and hollowed out | 1 cup uncooked rice (I used long grain par boiled) 185 grams | 1 teaspoon oregano 1/2 gram | 1 teaspoon basil 1/2 gram | 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 1/2 grams | 1/2 gram *6 springs fresh chopped Italian parsley | 1 clove garlic chopped | 1/4 - 1/2 cup chopped tomato pulp 55-82 grams | 2-3 tablespoons olive oil Pre-heat oven to 180C (375F) and lightly oil a large baking pan. In a medium bowl add rice and cover with water, allowing it soak for one hour, then drain and rinse. Rinse and dry tomatoes, carefully cut off top of tomato and set aside. Remove seed and pulp from the tomatoes, set aside the pulp and discard the seeds. In a medium bowl mix chopped tomato pulp, oregano, salt, parsley, garlic, 2-3 tablespoons (45 grams) olive oil and rice. Fill hollowed out tomatoes with mixture. Place tops back on tomatoes, sprinkle tomatoes with a little salt and drizzle with olive oil. Add roasted potatoes with rosemary and bake for approximately 45- 60 minutes or until potatoes and rice are tender. Serve immediately. Enjoy.

This is my favourite dish for three reasons: though based on rather basic ingredients, it is unabashedly rich and indulgent; its reddish/orangey colours evoke those of my favourite team (AS Roma), and you can do an excellent version of it in under 30 minutes.

Joseph’s amatriciana

Ingredients: Guanciale (cured Italian pig cheek. Do not use pancetta in any circumstance) | Pecorino Romano (abundant) | Tomato passata Calabrian chili | Salt | Pepper | Rigatoni or bucatini | Wine Dice the guanciale into thin strips. Remember to remove the hard part of the skin, and to slice off a bit of fat if the ratio of meat to fat is less than 1:3. Add to a non-stick pan at medium heat and let it heat gently until the guanciale is crispy and the fat renders. Add a splash of dry white wine (like a frascati), to deglaze the pan. This step is optional. Once the alcohol has evaporated, add some flakes of chilli and a high-quality tomato passata (or blended chopped tomatoes). Add some seasoning (but not too much salt), and let it simmer on a medium heat. In the meantime, bring water to the boil, and add either rigatoni (short pasta) or bucatini, depending on your (and guests’) preference. Tip: growing up I was always told that the water of the pasta must be as salty as the Mediterranean. Few things are more upsetting than an under-salted pasta. So be generous when salting the boiling water for pasta. Two minutes before the pasta is ready, set aside some of the starchy boiling water, and then quickly decant and add to the sauce. Another tip: always toss pasta into sauce, not vice versa. The pasta is at its most absorbent in the 10 seconds after it has been drained, so don’t waste time in mixing it with the sauce. As you toss it in, add in generous heaps of grated pecorino cheese, which should gently melt. This renders the sauce less red but also thicker. Use the water set aside to regulate the consistency. A good amatriciana must have a touch of sleepiness to it. Plate - on a heated plate preferably, add some grated pecorino and buon appetito .

www.harrietfairbairn.com | @harrietoflondon

The Guardian picture essay
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Food and Language

Language of food activism in italy, slow food restaurant menu and dinner at officina gastronomica alle tamerici, conclusion: language and food activism, acknowledgments, food activism and language in a slow food italy restaurant menu.

Carole Counihan is professor emerita of anthropology at Millersville University and has been studying food, gender, culture, and activism in Italy and the United States for forty years. She has published several book chapters and journal articles and the following books: Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia (Bloomsbury 2019; Italian edition Rosenberg and Sellier 2020), A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (Texas University Press 2009), Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth-Century Florence (Routledge 2004), and The Anthropology of Food and Body (Routledge 1999). She is the co-editor of Food and Culture: A Reader (Routledge 1997, 2008, 2013, 2018), Taking Food Public (Routledge 2012), Food Activism (Bloomsbury 2014), and Making Taste Public: Ethnographies of Food and the Senses (Bloomsbury 2018). She is editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways .

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Carole Counihan; Food Activism and Language in a Slow Food Italy Restaurant Menu. Gastronomica 1 November 2021; 21 (4): 76–87. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2021.21.4.76

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This essay explores how food activists in Italy purposely shape food and language to construct meaning and value. It is grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork on food and culture in Italy and looks specifically at the Slow Food Movement. The essay explores language and food activism through a detailed unpacking of the text of a menu prepared for a restaurant dinner for delegates to the Slow Food National Chapter Assembly in 2009. The menu uses descriptive poetic language to construct an idealized folk cuisine steeped in local products, poverty, history, and peasant culinary traditions. As I explore the language of the menu and the messages communicated by the food, I ask if they intensify people’s activism, advance Slow Food’s goals of “good, clean and fair food,” and promote food democracy.

Food activists in Italy mutually shape food and language in the construction of meaning and value. Food and language intertwine in many ways and pointed language can shape new understandings of cuisine and culture. This essay uses the Italian Slow Food Movement as an example of food activism and considers its goals and tactics, particularly as they are conveyed through alimentary language. Food activism consists of “people’s efforts to promote social and economic justice by transforming food habits” ( Counihan 2019 : 1) and includes buying organic and Fairtrade products, frequenting farmers markets, establishing community gardens, organizing against pesticides or GMOs, maintaining quality product designations, supporting legislation, and so on. Overall, it pursues food democracy: “the vision of an ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just system of food and agriculture” ( Hassanein 2003 : 84).

The essay examines the kind of food activism Slow Food promotes by performing a detailed exegesis of the menu of a restaurant dinner for delegates to the Slow Food National Chapter Assembly in 2009. It considers food not only as discourse created through the language of the menu but also as material substance on the plate, analyzing its symbolism in the context of Italian history and culture. The essay asks if the alimentary language of one menu in particular, and of food activism in general, can help produce the counter-hegemonic attitudes and behaviors fundamental to food system change.

Analysis of the menu reveals its construction of an idealized folk cuisine based on local, humble, tasty dishes grounded in historically important places and traditions. 1 Folk cuisine is similar to what pioneering folklorist Don Yoder called “folk cookery…traditional domestic cookery marked by regional variation” ( 2015 : 21). It includes “the foods themselves, their morphology, their preparation, their preservation, their social and psychological functions, and their ramifications into all other aspects of folk-culture.” For Italians, folk cuisine is cucina popolare , “popular cuisine, cuisine of the people,” or cucina povera , “humble cuisine, cuisine of poverty” ( Montanari 2001 ). 2 In Italy, folk cuisine has historically been rooted in the countryside and the peasant families who comprised the majority of the population for most of Italian history. Today folk cuisine is an idealized construct rather than daily fare. Since the 1930s, Italians have steadily abandoned peasant farming, and the percentage of the population employed in agriculture dropped from 47 percent in 1930 to 4 percent in 2008, where it remains today ( Pratt and Luetchford 2013 : 27). Since the 1980s, Italians have increasingly consumed processed, imported, and mass-produced foods in place of the locally raised foods of the past ( Vercelloni 2001 ).

The folk cuisine depicted in the Slow Food dinner menu accentuated three threads. First, it was local food, rooted in place, with the implication that locality was crucial to (although not synonymous with) quality and environmental sustainability. Second, folk cuisine was steeped in history and tradition, which generated pride but also a potential undercurrent of xenophobia. Third, it was a cuisine of poverty, born from scarcity, hunger, and inexpensive foods, which raised issues of access and equity. As I explore the language of the Slow Food dinner menu and the messages communicated by the food, I ask what kind of activism they promote and whether they advance Slow Food’s overriding goals of “good, clean and fair food”—“good: quality, flavorsome and healthy food; clean: production that does not harm the environment; fair: accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers.” 3

Founded in Italy in 1986, Slow Food is a global association claiming a million supporters and 100,000 dues-paying members in 160 countries organized into roughly 1,500 local chapters called “convivia” worldwide and condotte in Italy. 4 The association is an important player in Italy’s landscape of food activism, taking place alongside of and sometimes participating in other initiatives including community or school gardens, solidarity purchase groups, farmers markets, Fairtrade, farmworker organizing, and so on. Slow Food has grown beyond its early focus on good food to “becoming a legitimate actor in the political arenas of food production and consumption…climate change…energy and biodiversity” ( Siniscalchi 2018 : 186). Some adherents, such as twenty-six-year-old Riccardo Astolfi from Bologna, described its evolution from the “old soul” ( vecchia anima) to the “new soul” ( nuova anima ): “When I say the old soul, I refer to people who get together exclusively for hedonistic pleasure, for gourmet food for rich people. The new soul was born on the road to Terra Madre and is summarized…in the triad ‘good, clean and fair.’” Terra Madre is the biannual meeting Slow Food has held since 2004 for producers, consumers, chefs, and activists from all over the world, and within the association it represents the shift toward “eco-gastronomy” linking good food to environmentalism and labor justice. 5 The evolution from the old soul to the new soul has not been without conflicts and tensions, which members told me have often played out in the condotte .

All Slow Food members become part of a local chapter run by committees of member-volunteers with guidance from the central office in Bra, northwest Italy, the home of Carlo Petrini, one of the founders, longtime leader, and still in 2021, president of Slow Food International. Local chapters organize tastings and theme dinners around high-quality local products, support small-scale producers, establish school gardens and farmers markets, educate through Master of Food classes, establish “food communities” to protect high-quality endangered foods, and review restaurants for the best-selling Slow Food restaurant guide, Guida alle Osterie d’Italia . Membership is open to all for modest dues, 6 and participation in most events, like the “classic” Slow Food dinners, is open to both members and nonmembers and can become gateways to membership.

Slow Food has been both praised and criticized by those who have participated in and studied the association, but it is important to note that its approach and efficacy vary a great deal according to the commitment and abilities of its local chapter leaders and members. Some have called Slow Food elitist because of its sometimes pricey dinners and exclusionary notions of taste ( Chrzan 2004 ; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010 ; Paxson 2005 ). Others have accused the association of neglecting producers and failing to make more than minor changes to the food system because of inadequate or misguided efforts ( Brackett 2011 ; Lotti 2010 ; Simonetti 2012 ; West and Domingos 2012 ). Still others have praised it for introducing new ways of thinking about food to thousands around the globe and for building communities of consumers and producers to foster change ( Fontefrancesco 2018 ; Sassatelli and Davolio 2010 ; Siniscalchi 2018 ). Here I want to contribute to the literature on Slow Food by examining the role of language in fostering its goals.

My exploration of Italian food activism is grounded in years of residence and ethnographic research in different Italian locations over a span of forty-plus years. This essay focuses on data gathered during my ethnographic research on “Convivium Culture: Stories from the Slow Food Movement” in diverse regions of Italy in 2009. I studied the grassroots participation of Slow Food members in their local chapters. I did participant observation and informal interviews at Slow Food dinners, major events (Slow Fish and Terra Madre), tastings, farms, farmers markets, and the 2009 National Chapter Assembly. I recorded and transcribed thirty-eight semi-structured interviews in Italian and translated the excerpts used in this essay. I also cite some personal interviews I recorded with Slow Food members in Cagliari, Italy, in 2011 as part of a study of food activism in that city ( Counihan 2019 ).

Language can shape attitudes and behaviors surrounding food, and food itself speaks reams about culture, as Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson demonstrated in her study of France. She claimed that “every cuisine is a code…” and “words sustain cuisine” ( 2004 : 9–10). Linguistic anthropologists have outlined four ways that food and language constitute each other: “language-through-food, language-about-food, language-around-food, and language-as-food” ( Riley and Cavanaugh 2017 ; Karrebæk, Sif, Riley, and Cavanaugh 2018 ). Here I want to look at “language-about-food” as presented in the menu, and “language-through-food”—the way the food itself conveyed messages at the accompanying dinner—to ask how these discourses shape food activism.

Food is a lot like language. According to Roland Barthes, food contains and manifests “a collective imagination” and “a certain mental framework” ( 2013 : 24)—just as language does ( Sapir 1921 ). Food is “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior” ( Barthes 2013 : 24). These were manifest in the dinner menu, the dishes, the ingredients, and the ways they were combined, arrayed, and consumed. Cuisine contains a “structure” (25) based on a grammar of constituent units—such as courses within meals and dishes within courses—visible in the restaurant menu analyzed here. Yet cuisine also undergoes constant improvisation and evolution, as does language. Moreover, food is characterized by “polysemia” (28). Its ability to hold multiple meanings—what Arjun Appadurai calls its “semiotic virtuosity”—enhances its communicative power ( 1981 : 494). Moreover, as Appadurai observes, food has the “capacity to mobilize strong emotions” (494), which makes it a particularly powerful agent of relationships not only of hierarchy and separation such as he found in Indian caste system food rules but also of equality and intimacy, such as those generated among Slow Food dinner participants ( Siniscalchi 2018 : 188).

Sociologist Donna Maurer showed how language can shape food choice in the case of tofu’s introduction into the United States ( 1996 : 62). Initially, consumers resisted it, but changes in the discourse about tofu altered their perceptions of its acceptability and taste. Such discourses constitute a mode of “framing,” a way of seeing and interpreting foodways; sociologists Alison Adams and Thomas Shriver show how alternative agro-food movement organizations use framing to further their goals by creating meaning and a socially shared ideology ( 2010 : 35). Similarly, the Slow Food dinner menu “framed” food and projected certain ideologies, which were enhanced by Italians’ exuberant interest in both food and language.

Only a few studies of restaurants concentrate specifically on interpreting the menus. One is Irina Mihalache’s analysis of museum restaurants’ deployment of themed menus associated with special exhibitions. She found that “the menu and the food are multisensorial ‘lessons’ in history and culture” ( 2016 : 319); that is, they frame and recount the world in a certain way. Menus, others have found, can shape people’s eating experience and “actual perception of flavor” ( Mac Con Iomaire 2009 : 212). On an artfully constructed menu, “each item of food sums up and transmits a situation; it constitutes an information; it signifies” ( Barthes 2013 : 24).

In Italy, people talk constantly about food, particularly at meals, ideal sites for food-language discussions ( Karrebæk et al. 2018 : 20). 7 Slow Food member Raimondo Mandis expressed a widely shared belief: “Put two Italians together around a table, wherever they are, in Singapore, Los Angeles, Alaska, wherever they are, these two Italians around a table within five minutes will have started talking about food” (personal interview 2011). In Italy, food, like language, is highly localized and strongly linked to community identity; this provides fodder for many animated discussions about whose version of any given dish or idiom is better and why.

Language has always been important in furthering Slow Food’s activist mission and captivating adherents. Although the founders are Italian, and Italian is the language of the central office in Bra, “Slow Food” is always in English, which is also the default language of the Slow Food International website at www.slowfood.com . This website points viewers to websites in seven other languages: Italian, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese. All have a page called “Slow Food terminology,” 8 which defines key terms like “good, clean, and fair food,” “convivium,” and “eco-gastronomy”—all critical to changing the way people think about food by providing new terms for new concepts and practices.

As early as 1989, Slow Food established its own publishing house, Slow Food Editore. 9 Its mission is to publish books and magazines about high-quality and endangered foods, to educate consumers, and to promote sustainable food systems and eco-gastronomy. In an interview in 2009, Roberto Burdese, then-president of Slow Food Italy, told me: “For an organization like Slow Food, which is yes, political, but which above all wants to educate and inform, it is important to have our own publishing house which serves not only to tell our own stories but also to publish books and texts that contribute to understanding the spirit of our project.”

Also important in establishing and propagating Slow Food’s linguistic framing of alimentary issues were its chapter, national, and international websites and social media activity announcing events and connecting regularly with existing and potential new members ( Frost and Laing 2013 ). Social media language has played an increasingly important part in food activism ( Goodman and Jaworsky 2020 ). In her master’s thesis, Carolyn Bender (2012) took a detailed look at Slow Food’s significant media presence and found that it fostered democratic knowledge sharing and communication between chapters and the central office. Connecting whether virtually or in person to debate Slow Food’s actions has been critical to the association’s mission. As member Noemi Franchi told me, “The best thing about Slow Food for me is the fact that you can really give everyone a chance to speak and that you can put people from diverse places in communication with each other” (personal interview 2009).

One opportunity for Slow Food members to get together and exchange ideas was the National Chapter Assembly ( assemblea nazionale delle condotte ), which I was able to attend in March 2009 in Fiumicino, Italy, a city of 80,000 in the region of Lazio near Rome (and site of Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport). About 500 delegates came from 300 chapters all over Italy to participate in two days of discussions about Slow Food’s status and future plans. The chapter assemblies were important occasions for debating change in the association, and the one I attended was abuzz with excitement. For the first time ever, large portions of the conference were allocated to five-minute speeches from any member who wished to speak, and many did. Men and women, young and old, from Italy’s diverse cities, towns, and regions spoke of chapter activities and concerns at several sessions during the two days.

The conference activities began on Friday evening with delegates in regional groups dining at several restaurants in the Fiumicino area. I attended dinner with the Emilia-Romagna regional delegation at the restaurant Officina Gastronomica alle Tamerici (Gastronomic Workshop by the Tamarisks—hereafter Officina ). The restaurant’s name included “workshop” ( officina ), which highlighted the artisanal nature of the cookery, “gastronomic” ( gastronomica) , which accentuated skilled cooking and delicious food, and “tamarisks” ( tamerici ) or salt cedar trees, which emphasized locality, for they constituted a prominent species that thrived in the sandy salty soils of the littoral region.

I arrived from the conference hotel with a busload of hungry delegates at the Officina restaurant around 8:30 p.m. on a cool Friday, and each of us found a seat at one of several tables set for four to six people. I sat with a welcoming group that included one of my former students from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. Tables were set with white tablecloths, simple silverware, and a menu at each diner’s place ( figure 1 ). People eagerly began studying their menu and chatting about the dishes while anticipating their tastiness.

Officina gastronomica alle tamerici menu.

To uncover the Officina menu’s culinary signification of history and culture, I analyze it following one of the methods Jillian Cavanaugh and colleagues describe: “semiotic analysis of documents and media” ( 2014 : 93–94). This method examines how texts like the menu “describe and delimit the world around them” and “produce cultural and economic value for certain foods.” The transcribed menu in the original Italian is shown in figure 2 , with my English translation.

Transcribed Officina gastronomica alle tamerici menu with English translation.

The menu consisted of five “couplets,” representing five courses. The first line of each couplet was in gold letters and described a general context; the second line, in black print, slightly indented, described a dish. This dyadic structure was like call and response, a kind of poetry, a fact that recalls Elizabeth Andoh’s comment that, “translated literally, some Japanese restaurant menus could be mistaken for poetry” ( 2010 : 33). The Italian language of the Officina menu was rhythmic and alliterative—it rolled off the tongue with a mellifluous and pulsing cadence. Within the five couplets/courses, the dishes became longer and more elaborate as they went on, building to a crescendo in the dessert, and then ending with a final note of closure with the most basic food of all: homemade bread, pane fatto in casa .

The menu declared its overriding intent of “welcome” by using the word twice. In fact, the very first line of the menu declared the event a “welcome dinner” for the Slow Food delegates. The next line, describing the first course, then read: “Ladispoli: a welcome from the territory.” Welcome— benvenuto —was central to cultural practice everywhere in Italy and was often demonstrated through commensality ( Counihan 1984 ). On the menu, it had the double meaning of welcoming the Slow Food delegates from all over Italy to the conference, and also welcoming attendees to the specific place and cuisine of Lazio, the region in Central Italy where we were conferencing.

The menu stressed the importance of locality by mentioning several place names from Lazio: Ladispoli, Blera, Nepi, and Tarquinia. All had deep historical significance in ancient Roman and Etruscan times. Ladispoli was the site of the Etruscan port of Alsium near where we were dining, and Tarquinia’s famed Monterozzi necropolis was a Unesco World Heritage site. Renowned places like these, ubiquitous in Italy, were sources of patrimonial pride. The use of the word territorio in “Ladispoli: a welcome from the territory,” emphasized the centrality of local identity. Territorio was highly significant to many Italians and meant not only the land but also “meaningful place” imbued with local history, culture, and identity ( Counihan 2019 ).

In the first course, the food materialized the importance of locality in the “thinly sliced cured mackerel from our coast with a marinade of PGI artichokes from Ladispoli” ( figure 3 ). Use of the possessive “our” ( nostro ) laid claim to the mackerel, an inexpensive and tasty Mediterranean species integral to the traditional fishery. It was accompanied by a marinade of PGI artichokes from Ladispoli, the second mention of this important city. PGI—Protected Geographical Indication (IGP— Indicazione Geografica Protetta )—is an EU category recognizing excellent products linked to specific regions, like the artichokes in this dish ( Parasecoli 2014 : 253–254). The menu was full of foods clearly identified as local, and all three of its named vegetables—artichokes, broccoli, and fennel—were indigenous to the Mediterranean region. There were no products of the Columbian exchange commonly found in Italian cuisine such as tomatoes, green peppers, potatoes, and beans ( Guigoni 2009 ). Only in the very last course, dessert, did “black pepper from Honduras” appear. This was perhaps a quiet salute to the global origins of some important foods even in a context otherwise highlighting foods from the “territory,” from “our coast,” from “local production,” and from nearby famous sites of the venerated Etruscans and Romans.

Thinly sliced cured Italian mackerel from our shores with artichoke marinade.

Along with local products, the menu highlighted the cuisine of poverty at the heart of folk foodways. The first line of the second course/stanza was explicit—it read: “Cuisine of hunger: the return of the repressed.” This alluded to how hunger had been ubiquitous in the old days, but it was overcome and its memory “repressed” during the post–World War II Italian economic boom, marked by a rising standard of living, improved food security, abandonment of small-scale farming, and increased consumption of former luxury foods like meat. Nonetheless, the long history of dearth had shaped cuisines across Italy profoundly, and the inclusion of poverty foods at the Slow Food dinner materialized and memorialized this fact ( Capatti and Montanari 1999 ; Helstosky 2004 ).

The “cuisine of hunger” of the second course consisted of burnt grain “guitar” pasta with shellfish— chitarra di grano arso ai frutti di mare ( figure 4 ). Historically, mollusks and crustaceans, or frutti di mare (“fruits of the sea”), belonged to the cuisine of poverty because people gathered them for free, but today due to environmental degradation and overfishing, they have become scarce and costly. Burnt grain pasta was poor people’s food dating back perhaps to the eighteenth century. Scholarship is lacking, but media and cookbooks report that this pasta was made from burnt wheat gleaned by poor peasants—wheat scorched either by burning the stubble to clear the fields or by the hot threshing machines used in the harvest. 10 On the menu it appeared as “guitar” pasta, a spaghetti square in cross section rather than round, and typical of the Abruzzo region just east of Lazio. 11 Pasta made of burnt grain was once poor people’s food, cucina povera , and its consumption at a white tablecloth restaurant was a way to remember a past of scarcity and frugality. But it could also represent a transformation of that hunger food into a badge of distinction, and indeed burnt grain pasta has become chic and trendy ( Krader 2018 ). Its elevation in status by way of its heritage is similar to the “elite authenticity” Gwynne Mapes found in her analysis of New York Times food articles, which built distinction around qualities of “historicity” and “simplicity” among others ( 2018 ).

Burnt grain guitar pasta with shellfish.

The menu’s third course/stanza highlighted the enigmatic “tradition from stepmother to matrix.” Perhaps in the recipe, the stepmother represented new outside forces, contrasted with those belonging to matrix/ matrice connoting “mother,” “uterus,” and “origin, fundamental cause, inspiring element.” 12 This course emphasized the female influences on culinary traditions typical of folk cuisine, which originated in the domestic kitchen—both maternal, familial, foundational influences and new, external, “stepmother” ones. The stepmother/ matrigna is an anomalous figure in the family, wife to the husband but not mother to the children, occupying the mother space but not the real mother. Nadia Rosso reminds us of the long history in myth and literature of the cruel stepmother, la matrigna crudele , “the incarnation of the negative female stereotype,” renowned for her hostility to the husband’s children ( 2020 : 1–2). It is not clear how this image of the cruel stepmother might shape perception of the dish except perhaps to imply that some innovations are “cruel” and should be abandoned in favor of the “matrix” or original dish. The typical, local, humble dish of broccoli and skate soup 13 ( figure 5 ) underscored the ongoing imprint of tradition, here done in the style of the restaurant, Officina , which aligned with the matrix rather than the stepmother influences.

Broccoli and skate soup in the Officina house style.

The fourth course featured a fancier, meat-based, more prestigious dish—the long-named “primordial bivouac roast pork with bacon from the Nepi pig and crispy pork rind served cold with boiling creamed Tarquinian fennel” ( figure 6 ). For most of Italian history, meat was expensive, rarely eaten, and “a quintessential symbol of social prestige” ( Montanari 2001 : 4). Pork, however, was more accessible than beef because many peasant families raised a pig on scraps and forage, butchered it in late fall, and preserved the meat for the entire year, eventually eating every bit of it including muscle, lard, organs, feet, ears, and tail in various forms including boiled, fried, roasted, and preserved as salame, sausage, prosciutto, and head cheese (see Apergi and Bianco 1991 : 43–52). Roast pork was a prestigious cut appropriate to marking a festive occasion. The sauce of “boiling creamed Tarquinian fennel” adorning the sliced meat accentuated a renowned local vegetable. The allusion to “primordial” and “bivouac” signaled history, nature, the outdoors, and the wild, which were sometimes sites of festive meat consumption, for example at scampagnate , picnics in the countryside with friends ( Counihan 2004 : 125). The name of the course, “cuisine and social rituals,” underscored the importance of commensality to social relationships, widely acknowledged in Italy (117–138).

Primordial bivouac roast pork with Nepi bacon and crispy pork rind served cold with boiling creamed Tarquinian fennel.

The last course/stanza, dessert, had the somewhat ambiguous title contro il pasticcere —literally “in contrast to or against the pastry chef.” This was another celebration of humble foods, opposing them to fancy desserts made by trained confectioners. The dessert consisted of “locally produced water buffalo ricotta with olive oil from Blera, black pepper from Honduras, acacia honey, dried porcini mushrooms, and dried blueberries” ( figure 7 ). While the menu noted black pepper’s far-off origins, the rest of the ingredients were either explicitly local, such as the ricotta and Blera olive oil, or implicitly so, such as the honey, mushrooms, and blueberries, which were foraged wild foods and thus quintessentially part of folk cuisine ( Cucinotta and Pieroni 2018 ). The description of the dessert, dolce poco dolce , was a play on words, as dolce as an adjective means sweet, but as a noun it means a sweet or a dessert, hence the literal translation is “a slightly sweet sweet.” Ricotta, used in the dessert, was an inexpensive byproduct of cheese making and part of cucina popolare . After adding rennet to milk and making cheese from the curds, the leftover whey was “recooked” into “ricotta.” Its presence on the menu again gave attention to the frugality of folk cuisine, although the special occasion was marked by ricotta made from Italian water buffalo milk, prized for its higher fat content than regular cow’s milk ricotta.

A slightly sweet dessert of locally produced water buffalo ricotta with olive oil from Blera, black pepper from Honduras, acacia honey, dried porcini mushrooms, and dried blueberries.

The menu and meal spoke to and through the senses. The dishes were beautifully plated with a pleasing variety of colors, shapes, and forms: the red, orange, yellow, and beige of the carpaccio [ figure 3 ]; the dull gray-brown of the stringy burnt grain “guitar” pasta contrasting with the brilliant red-orange mussels in their shimmering black shells [ figure 4 ]; the yellow skate soup dotted with vibrant green specks of broccoli [ figure 5 ]. The meal appealed not only to the eyes but also to the other senses by displaying a variety of textures, temperatures, fragrances, and tastes: the chewy, dense, room temperature carpaccio ; the hot, liquid soup mingling the briny fragrance of skate with the earthy odor of broccoli; the firm dense room-temperature pork paired with the hot semi-liquid creamed fennel [ figure 6 ]; the smooth white buffalo ricotta lightly honey-sweetened, its silky melt-in-your mouth texture disrupted with crunchy bits of dried blueberries, dried mushrooms, and ground pepper [ figure 7 ]. The carefully orchestrated meal spoke through diverse sensory registers, which enriched the verbal message of the menu; food’s “materiality” and “discursivity” reinforced each other ( Mapes 2018 : 265).

As noted above, the menu ended with the most basic food of all, homemade bread, which accompanied the entire meal. Traditionally, bread constituted a large part of the diet of most Italians, especially peasants and workers ( Counihan 1984 , 2004 ; Teti 1976 ). But its home production and overall consumption have been waning since the mid–twentieth century as meat, sweets, and fats have played an ever-larger role in the diet ( Vercelloni 1998 , 2001 ; italiani.coop 2021 ). Placing homemade bread on the menu affirmed the importance of this traditional and highly localized comestible, which had for centuries been central to poor people’s diets and survival.

Some motifs observed in other forms of food activism were not evident in the Officina menu. For example, Michael Kideckel found themes of “anti-intellectualism” and “natural food” in his historical analysis of the language of US food activists since 1830 ( 2018 ). But neither were key to Slow Food or the dinner. On the contrary, Slow Food was quite intellectual—education about food and taste was central to its mission, and activities combined cognitive and sensory learning ( Counihan 2019 : ch. 2). In the Officina menu, “natural” was not in evidence, nor was “organic.” The dinner did not celebrate elite dishes— cucina ricca —or abundance, excess, gluttony, or waste ( Montanari 2001 ). Although the dinner included several courses, portions were small, the pace leisurely, and participants were able to consume every bite of each course. Absent in the menu were foreign or ethnic dishes, ingredients, or spices, with the exception of black pepper. This absence was a double-edged sword, creating space for forgotten local foods and their producers but closing off appreciation of foreign and ethnic cuisines and their immigrant purveyors.

Do activities like the menu and dinner strengthen participants’ commitment to food democracy? Such events are certainly fun, social, and full of good food and education about it, but do they develop critical consciousness? What sorts of activism do they promote? While in some situations, including some Slow Food dinners, food can be an instrument of class privilege and what Josée Johnston tellingly calls “bourgeois piggery,” she importantly emphasizes that “food also represents an entry point for political engagement” ( 2008 : 94). This was confirmed by Slow Food Cagliari member Carla Marcis, who stated, “Slow Food has enabled me to see food as a way of changing things” (personal interview 2011). Further, Johnston argues, because power is fragmented and ubiquitous, resistance must be pluralistic and continuous (2008: 95). Repeated quotidian acts of shopping and eating can entrench new ways of behaving and influence the economy and culture of food. Commensal events help develop new ways of thinking ( Marovelli 2019 ).

We cannot really know how profoundly one event, such as the Officina dinner, affects people and leads to changes in their behavior, but participating in many events over a long period of time is likely to generate long-lasting attitudes and behaviors, especially when carried out in pleasant convivial settings. As Carla Marcis said, “I think it makes sense to participate in events often over time because…the message needs to be repeated to restimulate commitment” (personal interview 2011). The Officina dinner and the many other Slow Food dinners, tastings, workshops, farm visits, and panel discussions are part of a holistic strategy of social change. The dinners are effective precisely because they are open and welcoming; moreover, people feel comfortable because they know that commensality guarantees conviviality and that people share a grammar of food. As anthropologist Valeria Siniscalchi has shown, the dinners are a setting for developing a shared sense of taste and belief in its importance; they are “collective” practices that develop “inclusion” and “cultural intimacy” through eating and tasting food with others (2018).

At the dinner, the consumption of the menu’s rich verbal description of the forthcoming meal was followed by visual and gustatory feasting on the food and further talk about it—this mingling of word and deed is fundamental to Slow Food’s practice. The feedback experience of joining at the table with others to talk and eat and talk some more develops and materializes critical thinking about food ( Cavanaugh 2016 : 43; Le Grand 2015 ; Marovelli 2019 ). According to the Sardinian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, language ( linguaggio) is key to forging political resistance because it contains “a determined conception of the world” ( 1955 : 3). Food anthropologist Sidney Mintz (1996 : 31) links language to the construction of meaning and authority, citing Eric Wolf who said: “The ability to bestow meanings—to ‘name’ things, acts, and ideas—is a source of power” ( 1982 : 388). An important tactic of food activism is seizing the power to name foodways, and to give them pointed meanings by manipulating language ( linguaggio ).

This in its own small way was what the Officina menu did. It joined other constructions of language by Slow Food—on its website, in newsletters and emails, and in the publications of Slow Food Editore—to project oppositional thinking condensed in the simple formula of “good, clean, and fair food.” The dinner and menu clearly promoted “good”, that is, “quality, flavorsome and healthy” food in its delicious dishes composed mostly of local, fresh, nutritious vegetables, grains, and seafood. The menu was not explicit about “clean” food, that is “production that does not harm the environment,” but implied this value in emphasizing food that was grown, foraged, or raised locally, and hence was potentially sustainable. Nor was the menu explicit about “fair” food, that is, food with “accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers.” However, it raised awareness of equity issues by highlighting “the cuisine of hunger” born of the poverty that peasant farmers endured for centuries in Italy. The menu implied that rural folk had to make do with inexpensive, foraged, and left-behind ingredients because their working conditions were unfair. The menu gave pride of place to the dishes they developed, which were deeply rooted in regional Italian territory and culture.

The menu and dinner fostered an activism based on critical consumption. They introduced local foods and made them accessible to outsiders through participation in Slow Food. But they did not address the potential xenophobia entrenched in an exclusionary local cuisine. They did not confront the potential classism of a lovely dinner in a white tablecloth restaurant and its possible projection of “elite authenticity,” which provided status to adherents without challenging the hierarchical food system ( Mapes 2018 ). They did not tackle how to restructure local and global food production to ensure dignified working conditions and food sovereignty. Activists will continue to address these dangling issues in their quest for food democracy by thinking critically not only about the actions they take but also about the language they use and the meanings it encodes.

This essay sprang from an invitation to give a keynote speech at the 2012 Cornell Conference on “The Language of Food.” I am particularly grateful to its organizer, then Cornell graduate student Diana Garvin (now assistant professor of Italian at the University of Oregon), for her role in stimulating my thinking about language in food activism. I thank the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Colorno and Pollenzo, Italy, for hosting me as a visiting professor of food anthropology from 2004 to 2016 and for supporting my research. I thank the many Slow Food members and staff who generously shared their knowledge of the association with me. Special thanks to anthropologist Valeria Siniscalchi, a native of Rome and the Lazio region, who helped me understand and interpret the menu, who has provided much insight into Slow Food through her own research, and who has been a valued friend and colleague for many years. As always, thanks to my husband, anthropologist Jim Taggart, for feedback and inspiration. Finally, thanks to colleague and friend Brigida Marovelli, two anonymous reviewers, and the Gastronomica editors for constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

I am grateful to anthropologist James Taggart for suggesting the term “folk cuisine” to me. It is not common in the literature, but recently ethnobotanists Cucinotta and Pieroni (2018) used it in reference to the rich wild plant–based culinary culture of the Aeolian Islands, Sicily.

The title of Couffignal’s (1974) book encapsulates folk cuisine: The cuisine of poverty. The foods closest to nature. The oldest dishes in the world. Recipes passed down in huts and farmhouses (my translation of La cucina povera. I cibi più vicini alla natura. I piatti più antichi del mondo. Le ricette tramandate nelle capanne e nelle cascine ).

From Slow Food’s website: www.slowfood.com/about-us/slow-food-terminology .

On Slow Food numbers, see www.slowfood.com .

Siniscalchi notes how Slow Food’s evolution was manifest in its taste education courses: “The more classic [Master of Food] programs are organized around products such as cheese or wine, but new programs have been added over time on themes, such as food shopping, garden products, and cooking without waste. These new themes are in line with the association’s evolving interests that have become attuned to environmental issues” (1918: 190).

Dues to join Slow Food USA as of January 27, 2021, were $30.00 per student, $60.00 per individual, and $100.00 per family, with a sliding scale option starting at $30.00 ( https://slowfoodusa.org/become-a-member ). Dues to join Slow Food Italy as of January 27, 2021, were €10 for individuals under thirty, €25 for individuals thirty and over, and €70 for families ( https://soci.slowfood.it/joinus/joinus_02_blank_choose_membership ).

“Consumption of edibles and potables is linked to language use. This use includes language through, about, around, and as food, and, in many cases, all at the same time.…Eating is potently combined with discourse in consumption activities via commensality, the social act of eating together” ( Karrebæk et al. 2018 : 20)

See www.slowfood.com/about-us/slow-food-terminology

See www.slowfood.com/slow-food-editore

A third theory was that “it was the burnt flour collected off the floor of communal ovens after loaves were baked” ( Krader 2018 ).

According to Wikipedia, guitar pasta is typical of the central Adriatic and Abruzzi region and is made with a tool traditionally found only there. See https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_alla_chitarra .

“madre…útero…l’origine, la causa fondamentale, l’elemento ispiratore, e sim., di un fatto o di un avvenimento.” www.treccani.it/vocabolario/matrice

Several websites claim that broccoli and skate soup is a traditional Roman home-cooked dish, for example, “it is a food typical of Roman cuisine, which in general is based on humble ingredients and ingenious dishes prepared with the leftovers from elite tables and with high-fat parts designed for survival, for satisfying by filling the stomach” (my translation). www.agrodolce.it/2015/10/30/broccoli-arzilla-lespressione-della-cucina-casalinga-romana

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Writing about food in Italy. From domestic storytellers to food writers

38 Comments

I have a black pen in my hand, it is quite anonymous but it has a fine tip, it allows me to write easily, words sliding on the paper without effort: they spring from the inside without pauses, filters or interruptions. I’ve written the most beautiful things, the ones that moved me to tears, with paper and pen. When I transfer those tactile words here on the blog, I can rearrange them, giving an order to phrases and thoughts, finding that red thread that binds them together.

Today I am at my desk, typing meditatively at my computer with ink-stained fingers, feeling lightened by so many thoughts that crowded my mind and that could not find a place to rest. Now they have it.

Today’s reflections follow up on what I wrote about food writing on Corriere della Sera , where I explained what I think of this profession, how and when my curiosity for this form of writing was born, what I read and what I like. Everything began with a fascination for foreign writers such as Elizabeth David , M.F.K. Fisher and Ruth Reichl , until I discovered that writer in whose voice I recognize myself more, which comforts me and inspires me: Laurie Colwin . My journey began from abroad, but today I come back to Italy, holding on to my roots, to who I am.

It is food writing also in Italian, it does not have a translation as many other words such as computer and blog. Why don’t we have a word to describe this profession in Italian? Is food writing existing at all in Italy?

Every time grandma passes me a recipe, she does it through a memory, a precise moment in time when she learnt it, an occasion during which she prepared it, a person who taught it. Whether it was Aunt Antonietta and her latte alla portoghese , Aunt Valeria and her pasta with meatballs, or Fine, that lady who was so good at cooking that was asked to prepare meals in every household of the village during harvest time, they are never impersonal lists of ingredients and procedures, but stories. She would tell me the ingredients, the whys and wherefores, interspersed by superstitions and uses.

Perhaps food writing in Italy has never existed before, or it is just taking more time than in other countries to root, because basically the passing down of culinary knowledge has always been based on an oral tradition , on the margin notes written on family cookbooks with a clean calligraphy, as you would learn in school before the war, on the informal chatter of a Sunday morning spent in the kitchen.

Food writing struggled to rise to the level of literature because it was already there, among the domestic walls, mixed with the real food cooked and eaten.

Things change, though. This oral tradition of domestic storytellers is slowly disappearing with the evolution of the family: in the recent years a spontaneous response has replaced the old way of passing down recipes. Food writing exists in Italy today, it is not recognized yet, but you can find it in the pages of some blogs, where new writers write with their personal voices about their relationship with food, with a territory, with a gastronomic tradition.

Giulia, Juls and the food writing

You can apply the label food writing to many different areas: when you write a gastronomical critique, when you write an essay about economics, politics, agriculture and sociology with a food perspective, when you write a memoir or a reportage on GMO… the kind of food writing that resonates with me, which made me exclaim this is what I want to do when I grow up, is writing recipes, introduced, enriched, stuffed and wrapped with memories and stories of my life or related to my family.

I had to face immediately an obstacle, an internal, auto-imposed barrier which had much to do with my self esteem. I had a wonderfully ordinary life, without drama, without sudden and inconsiderate decisions – if you exclude my first and last tattoo which I got when I was 27. Was this life worth to tell? Could it be really interesting for someone?

Then I figured out the importance of having a perspective. I realized that food has always been there, not as a backdrop, not as a faint garlicky smell on the back of my mind. Food made me who I am, honest, reliable and optimistic, it helped me to deal with those traumas or simply those challenging moments of growth which are always present in the life of a teeneager and young woman.

As a naive country girl, not able to pronounce profanity or to argue with someone, I would overcome the fear of not being accepted at school, not being part of a group, bringing a tray of biscotti when we would meet to study. Those biscuits still taste of self-assertion, they remind me of an unripe age which was going to blossom soon.

I would wipe out the disappointments of an adolescent love, when I used to fancy guys I never addressed a word to, whose names I barely knew, with a steaming cup of afternoon tea, in which I would dunk two biscuits at a time, until they became soggy and soft. Going down through my throat, they would melt that bitter knot that we all know very well, leaving only the sweet taste of sugar. Even today a cup of well brewed tea solves most of my problems.

At the university I made new friends and left my shell behind when I volunteered to cook during home parties in tiny scarcely lit kitchens, with just a burner and a few pans. I was there, in the midst of so many people I would meet for the first time, but I felt protected, keeping a foot in my natural environment. The wooden spoon was my magic wand and my security blanket. After so many years still nothing has changed.

I have always experienced food on a personal and emotional level, as a remedy, a therapy, a way to celebrate, to awaken memories, to keep them alive.

My food writing often betrays this intimate dimension. Those words, that I would relentlessly turn over in my mind when I was learning to grow up, gushed out and since then I have not been able to stop them. They changed my life when, at the age of 28, in the midst of the generational crisis of Saturn Return, I had a desperate need to redefine my identity as a young woman.

And I did it with food: cooking it with dedication, learning to appreciate it and especially learning to write about it open-heartedly, without a filter. As an introvert, I found my way out.

They say that the moment a child is born, the mother is also born. In my case, when I wrote my first post here on the blog on February 1, 2009, a food writer was also born or, as Ruth Reichl would say, a writer. As Dianne Jacob refers on her book, Will write for food , she told me the term “food writer” is pejorative, like “woman writer.” She’s a writer, she says. That’s it.

Food writing is writing about everyday life, with a distinct perspective, that of food: cooked, shared, offered.

Writing about food, in Italian and in English

I write about food in Italian and English with the same emotion, with the same enthusiasm and commitment. On the one hand, I am charmed by the American and English food writing that taught me so much, in terms of language, structure and methodology, and equally inspired me and moved me, with Elizabeth David, Ruth Reichl and Laurie Colwin as teachers.

On the other hand, I owe so much to Italy, my home, my family, my training and the essence of who I am. I love the Italian language, its nuances and its musicality, just as I am fond of the English one, especially when it comes to food. Years ago I was in Manchester and I found a menu in a farm-to-table restaurant, which for months I read enjoying every word as a delicious mouthful, like the last bite you leave aside, the one with the perfect balance of ingredients and textures.

I love writing in English as I like to imagine to have a small part in describing Italy and its gastronomical culture to foreigners with a fresh and authentic perspective, as an Italian, updating the idea that sometimes is diffused abroad of a country crystallized in a Sofia Loren’s movie.

We still have so much to give in terms of knowledge and appreciation of food, and I would like to do my part sharing the recipes of my culinary tradition, cooked as we do it today in my family, thanks to that original relationship I have always had with food, at home.

Even in Italy we have some extraordinary examples of food writing, which struck me before I knew that writing of food would become my profession: Camilleri – who wouldn’t want to sit at dinner with Montalbano -, Dacia Maraini and the penetrating smells of Bagheria , Clara Sereni and her Casalinghitudine , recently discovered thanks to Laura .

In the last years emerged also the voices of many bloggers who developed a style, an identity, that proudly make food writing all’italiana : we should start to reassess what we can do at home. We must look curiously at what happens outside the national borders without putting ourselves on the second level, something in which, as Italians, we tend to excel. Let’s make our voice credible, even outside the national borders, though we must be the first ones to believe we are worth to be listened to.

I have a voice. Sometimes I feel it strong and definite, as it could easily overcome the noise that surrounds us. Other times my voice falters, trembles and mingles with sighs, like the day when I discussed my final project at the university, like when Tommaso told me that first night ‘shall we speak?’.

I do not hang out at Michelin starred restaurants and I certainly miss the lexicon to describe a dinner of that level, but I’m sure I am able to communicate the emotions that you could experience in cooking a certain recipe, I am convinced that I can make you feel able of cooking it, help you to prepare it in the best possible way, avoiding some of the mistakes that I have already committed.

For so long I thought that mine was another level of food writing, lower, prosaic, but today I reconsidered my position. Today I acknowledge which is my mission, what is the impact I want to have in other people’s lives, I have given a meaning to my work: I do not want to amaze or impress, I do not want to put myself on a different level, I want to write accessible recipes, that could drag you into the kitchen, to rediscover that unstoppable power that the well cooked and well enjoyed food has, as it can simply save you a dinner with friends or, in the most extreme cases, save your life, helping you to reinvent it.

So no recipe for today, just a ton of reflections and chats. If you reached the end of this post I’d be happy to hear your ideas, perspective and consideration on food writing, and I’ll see you again within the end of the week with a barely risotto with mushrooms!

No related posts.

This Post Has 38 Comments

Loved the post. So entertaining. Glad you mentioned Manchester as I live not far from there and in fact was there on Saturday and had lunch at Carluccios. I look forward to your next post.

Manchester was a business trip, I was there for a week and had completely freedom. Loved every single moment of that trip, and that restaurant with a solo dinner was the highlight!

Love your recipes. I have an allergy to garlic and it’s so refreshing to see these amazing dishes that don’t always add it. Thanks for sharing.

Excellent piece! Enjoyed every word of it. It is true that Italians have written home made recipe booklets for their families for generations. I personally was lucky enough to find beautifully calligraphed menus and recipes for Christmas and Easter during the war! Absolutely mesmerizing to touch and read. You’re doing an awesome job! <3

what a treasure Saghar! This reminds me when I bought a second hand copy of Il talismano di Ada Boni on eBay, and found a book full of notes from a nonna. It is like getting into another person’s life!

Amica, i tuoi post sono sempre bellissimi, ma stavolta ti sei superata. Viene voglia di abbracciarti ad ogni riga, oltre che di farti i complimenti per il coraggio e la passione che hai investito per diventare la scrittrice che sei oggi, per me probabilmente la migliore scrittrice di food in Italia. Sei un’ispirazione e un modello.

Amica, e tu eri con me quella prima volta a Londra, quando jaden di Steamy Kitchen in collegamento dall’America ci diceva che lavorava solo 3 ore al giorno e che ci campava l’intera famiglia… ma ti ricordi?

I love this post ♡♡♡ Really is like I think about food and love for the life.

thank you SO much Gloria! ♡♡♡

Cook on and write on. Sharing the awareness of the beauty or interest and fascination of the moment is the critical factor. Thanks!

Thank you Alyce! I will keep on cooking and keep on writing, I find my motivation and my fuel in the interaction with you! so thank you, thank you, thank you!

What a stunning piece of writing here! And the conclusion is really, food writing doesn’t need a word in Italian, it is part of life.

that could have been the title, you condensed the whole article in one perfect sentence! and, most of the thoughts here are the development of our chats, of everything we’ve been saying through the years! x

A really stunning essay, Giulia, just beautiful! As always, your writing is lyrical, honest, and heartfelt. You portray the evolution and philosophy of your food writing. For me (and my wife) food writing has always been an important of my life. When I was in graduate school I cooked (and read) my way through Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking; I devoured the essays in Gourmet Magazine. A large book case in our Florence apartment is filled with cook books and food writing. These days I most enjoy highly evocative and expansive food essays such as yours, with recipes or not. Your writing about Italian cooking comes from the heart, from your roots, and I find it to be highly satisfying. Thanks for all you do for Italian food, cooking, and food writing!

Thank you so much Bob! I hope one day I’ll get to meet you and your wife, I guess there will be a lot to talk about! I’ve just browsed though Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking very superficially, but lately it is like everything is telling me to read it and cook from it extensively, and your message today is just another piece in the puzzle!

Thank you, Guilia, very well written. You should never hesitate to do anything. I enjoyed every word, as usual.

thank you so much Bonnie!

Wonderful piece! I agree that writing is writing whatever your focus is and it doesn’t have to be labelled. Food features in my writing whether it’s fiction or non-fiction simply because it’s an integral and very important part of my life. The ‘lexicon’ used to describe dining at high-end restaurants is full of cliches and works for superficial experience of food. Simplicity, honesty and genuine passion for food in your stories are by no means prosaic or inferior. You are a writer. And a really good one. Thank you for sharing.

thank you so much Amela, you really warmed my heart with your comment! Reading your bio I value your comment even more! thank you!

Even though I’ve subscribed to your blog for some time now, this is the first time I’ve reached out to you with a comment. With this post, I have learned more about you and am proud that you are so self-aware at such a young age. You are truly gifted and are handling it with integrity. Thank you for sharing this with us. You are enriching many lives.

Mary Anne in Austin, TX

Thank you very much Mary Anne, for your kindest words and for stopping by to leave this comment, it is always heart-warming to give a name, an origin and a voice to a reader. Thank you!

Giulia grazie per aver scritto questo post così forte e coraggioso ma dolce e umano allo stesso tempo. La tua scrittura deve proprio assomigliarti! un abbraccio e un grazie enorme per i tuoi pensieri che condividi con noi.

grazie Michela, vuol dire tanto! :*

Guilia, We met at an Annette Joseph workshop where you prepared an incredible lunch. I have followed you ever since because during that day you made me feel as if we were cooking together in your own kitchen, as friends or family would do, not as a professional to a class. In my eyes you signify what Italian cooking is at it’s heart, love and sharing. Keep writing, cooking, sharing and loving. Grazie mille, Susan

Oh hello Susan! 🙂 I remember that day, and I remember that everything went smooth because there was a good group of people who loved cooking and sharing and we had so much fun! This said, I’m going to treasure your words, as being also a cooking teacher this is my aim every time, and you can’t even imagine how glad I am you had such an experience! a big hug!

i have tears in my eyes reading your post. I dont know much about food writting and my cooking on the end of a long working day is not allways fun. But food is for me emotion pur .. i love to travel and to explore and i love italian food a lot since it reminds me of my time as aupair in Firenze, when i was 17. There are still a lot of recepie in my all day cooking thst i learned in Florence. I have a cake recepie that my mom wanted to bake .. i bought here all the ingredients but she died unexpacted with 68 a week later. I stand in her kitchen crying after she past away with my sister and we backed this cake in her memory .. yes to me Soulfood excised

Now I have tears in my eyes reading your comment, Sonja. What you did with your sister was probably the purest form of love, cooking as a way to remember, and celebrate. Which cake did you bake? it must be very spacial now for you.

Guilia, thank you for mentioning my book, Will Write for Food. I like the meditative style of this blog post, the way you keep coming back to what you value most, which is family recipes. Many of us agree that nothing excites us more than writing down and reproducing beloved recipes from family members.

Thank you Dianne, for everything. If you could read the article in Italian on Corriere della Sera that originated this post, you would find there again your book, which I consider my bible for food writing. I read it once a year, every time finding new and interesting food for thought!

Continuing to enjoy your blog, and what about those great photographs! Wish I could reach through the screen and take a bite. Keep it up please.

ahah! Thank you Randy! 🙂

I love your comment about recipes in Italy – they are not impersonal lists of ingredients, but rather memories of a person and how they created food that was memorable. When I share a “recipe”on my blog, http://www.blog.learntravelitalian.com , I consider it really a “method” – either one I have learned through trial and error, or more commonly, one I have learned from my mother or grandmother. That is what really makes the food I prepare for my own family special in my mind. I hope my children will continue to pass these recipes down for the next generation.

Giulia, I just came across this post and it so resonated with me. I often too have felt like my writing was not living up to some unspoken expectation. Keep writing and cooking and telling your story. The world needs your beautiful perspective.

Impressive! I really like the way you explained everything. Italian Food is love!

Impressive! Italian Food is love!

wow, reading this I feel so similar in terms of how I connect with food and how, as an introvert, I use it as an escape too! I love understanding my food, blogging it, sharing the excitement and nourishment with others, and just cooking/baking everyday as a way of enjoying my personal place after a school day. I absolutely love this and i relate so much!

Thank you so much for your message Riya, I can perfectly relate with what you say, cooking is the best way to find your personal place after a school day!

I just discovered your website and read some blogs and I can’t stop myself from contacting you and giving you a big Thumbs Up for the quality work that you’ve been doing.

I am also writing about (Food) these days and I’ve written an article on the topics

I’ll be very honoured If you post my article on your blog. Please let me know what you think, I can send the article today.

Best Regards, Bela Watson

Food in Italy Essay Example

Pages: 15 (4086 words)
Published: February 3, 2017
Type: Essay

There is a saying that states ‘one either lives to eat or eats to live’ and Italy as a country is ruled by the former. Italy is a culture that is rich and saturated in their traditions of cooking. They take pride in their food and live by the credo that food is only used if it is fresh, local and in season. There has been much debate on what defines Italian food and through research one can see that Italian food is not typical of a specific dish, rather that each region offers a new variance of depth and originality that is not common to the Americanized beliefs of solely pasta and pizza.

Yes one could lump Italian food into categories such as breads, pasta, olive oil, cured meats and cheese but each of these foods is made in such a differe

nt way depending on the region that to really understand the country and the roots of its food one must look deeper into the individual regions. The twenty regions of Italy, as shown in Figure 1 are full of their individual gastronomy and it would take days to discuss all of them. For the purpose of this research paper the regions of Piedmont, Tuscany, and Sicily will represent the regional cuisines from northern, central and southern Italy.

This paper will describe the cuisines of each region through the geography, starches, fats, fruits, vegetables, proteins and dairy, comparing differences that exist from one region to another and the connection between diet and the domestic capacity to provide the necessary ingredients. This paper will go on to discuss the health benefit

of the Italian Mediterranean diet and what the country has done to sustain it. Figure 1: Regional Map of Italy Source: Kostioukovitch, E. (2009). Why Italians love to talk about food.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. ix. Copyright 2009 by Jeffrey L. Ward. Taste of Northern Italy: Piedmont Food in the north has made a big impact on the culture of northerners as regions gather at festivals and parties to celebrate the harvesting of produce. Using Piedmont as an example, this section will discuss the traditional foods and dishes found in northern Italy and the regions domestic capacity to produce them. These foods are based largely on rice and polenta instead of pasta that is typically found in the south, game animals such as pheasants or wild fowl, the use of butter and lard instead of olive oil and of course magnificent cheeses.

Piedmont is situated in the northeast of Italy bordering France and Switzerland and focuses on rich hearty meals. Piedmont is Italy’s wealthiest region and their gastronomy is known for being French inspired focusing on refinement and perfectionism (Thorn, 2005). Piedmont has the greatest agricultural differences in all of Italy due to its variety in topography. The land there is comprised of mountains, the Alps, which transform into rolling hills, low valleys and high river beds. Much like the rest of Italy Piedmontese pride themselves on using seasonal, fresh and local ingredients (Roden, 1990).

Pasta is not as popular in the north as it is in the south therefore the people of Piedmont rely on polenta and rice as the starch in their diet. Polenta was once considered peasant

food and its growth is celebrated on the last Sunday of April each year. Polenta accompanies many meat and vegetable dishes such as puccia which contains pork, cabbage, butter, polenta and seasonal vegetables (Riley, 2007). Rice based dishes are at the fore front of Piedmontese cooking as they hold over half of Italy’s rice growing land and export approximately 70% around the word (Blengini & Busto, 2009).

The most well known varieties of rice produced are Arborio and Carnaroli. One of the most popular dishes made with rice in Piedmont is called risotto which can be mixed with frogs that are found in the rice fields, cheese and wild mushrooms (Costanzia, 2009). Due to the varying geography Piedmont has a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. In the hills apples, peaches, cherries and strawberries are grown. In the valley a nice selection of yellow, green and red peppers, artichokes, asparagus, cabbage and cardoons are harvested (Riley, 2007).

One way Piedmontese love to eat their vegetables is with a bagna caurda, one of their most authentic dishes. In a terracotta pot, garlic and anchovies are simmered with olive oil to form a thick sauce, then raw seasonal vegetables and breads are dipped into the sauce and eaten. Although this is one of Piedmont prized dishes, the climate is not conducive to grow olive trees and therefore to produce olive oil. However, Piedmont has a standing relationship with neighbouring region Liguria and trades wine for olive oil (Costanzia, 2009). The food richest in tradition, uniqueness and specialty to Piedmont is the white truffle.

Each year a truffle festival is held on the first Sunday

of October bringing in thousands of people from all over the world to hunt for truffles and celebrate the harvest. Truffles are a beautifully aromatic mushroom that can be grated on top of salad, pasta or risotto dishes (Roden, 1990). Autumn is the best time for cooking in Piedmont as it is game season, frog and snail season and most products are ready for harvest: grapes, truffles and wild mushrooms (Kistioukovitch, 2009). Protein in a Piedmontese diet mainly comes from pork, cattle and game.

Since Piedmont is situated inland fish is not a staple in their diet. Freshwater fish and trout are found in some mountain streams with eels and frogs found in the rice fields. However, a healthy diet of saltwater fish as found in the south of Sicily is unattainable (Roden, 1990). Therefore, Piedmontese are world renowned for their cattle which is rich in flavour and tenderness. Not only is this region the largest producer of beef in Italy but they are also known for their use of donkey, goose, goat and pig in various dishes. These meats are often used to make homemade sausages, pates, salamis and cured meats.

What differs in Piedmontese use of cured meats is they use all parts of the animal as a delicacy. For example galantine is the head of a pig from the shoulder up, including tongue and throat which is rubbed down with rum, bay leaves, anise seeds and nutmeg (Riley, 2007). Piedmont’s large source of cows helps to lead the region in producing an abundance of cheese and butter. Butter is used as the main source of fat in Piedmontese cooking and

is one of the main distinctions in north and south cooking as southern food mainly uses olive oil. Two of the most popular cheeses in Piedmont are Bra and Castelmagno.

Bra is made mostly from cow’s milk with a small quantity of goat or sheep’s milk to round off the flavour. Semi-firm Bra is aged for at least forty five days while hard Bra is aged for over six months. Bra cheese is often used in local dishes such as risotto or polenta (Costanzia, 2009). Castelmagno is a blue cheese made largely of cow’s milk and is considered to be very aromatic due to the fields the cows graze on. This cheese is heated, cooled then pressed and aged in cool dark caves. Castelmagno is often eaten on its own or dipped in honey (Riley, 2007).

Italians are not big fans of sweet dessert; they prefer cheeses, fruits and biscuits at the end of a meal. However, Piedmontese are known for their love of pastries and desserts (Riley, 2007). This is in large part due to their production of hazelnuts, chestnuts and chocolate. Hazelnuts are mostly used in confectionaries and mixed with Piedmont’s chocolate to make world famous desserts. Some examples are Ferrero’s Nuttella, a hazelnut chocolate spread, giandujiooti, hazelnut chocolate squares and nougat, a mixture of vanilla, sugar, honey and hazelnuts that form a soft texture (Costanzia, 2009). Taste of Central Italy: Tuscany

Eating together at long tables with family and friends is the culture that revolves around food in central Italy. Central Italy has the best of both northern and southern foods and cuisines. Typical foods include a wide selection

of artisanal breads, smooth olive oils, fish, cured meats, beef and cheeses. The region of Tuscany will be used to describe these dishes and the domestic capacity to produce them. Tuscany is considered to be part of central Italy located on the west side of the country. Tuscany’s coastline is situated in-between the Ligurian Sea to the north and the Tyrrhenian Sea to the south.

Adorned with stunning landscapes, the rolling hills of the Apennines and brilliant light, Tuscany was once considered one of the wealthiest regions of Italy (Roden, 1990). Tuscans are known for demanding quality products but using them in simplistic ways in their cooking. They eat local in-season produce that is preferred to be eaten unmasked by heavy sauces as seen in the south. Traces of Spanish, French and Jewish influences reflect in their cooking. They prefer the rustic sense of cooking such as eating food raw, grilling food over coals or cooking over open flame.

Different types of food require different types of wood, offering new, exciting aromas and flavouring agents to the produce. Meat is smoked over olive wood while bread is baked in oak wood. Tuscans enjoy the food that comes right from the farm to the table and specialize in breads, vegetables meats, seafood and fine cheeses (Kostioukovitch, 2009). The estates in Tuscany produce wheat, spelt and corn which help in the processing of pasta and breads. Chestnuts are plenty in Tuscany and are usually ground into chestnut flour, a major export in Tuscany, for the use of making bread (Roden, 1990).

Tuscan bread is a staple ingredient in almost all meals and differs from

other regions in Italy because they do not use salt in the making. Tuscans believe that their food is already full of flavour so why waste added ingredients that are not needed. Due to the lack of salt in the bread it slowly absorbs moisture and therefore will last for many days. Tuscans are firm believers in ‘waste not want not’ and will reuse the stale bread in hearty soups such as ribollita filled with Tuscan kale, fresh white beans, potatoes, tomatoes, Tuscan bread and olive oil (Ohrback, 2006). Another classic use of Tuscan bread is bruschetta.

Bruschetta consists of round crusty bread, drizzled with olive oil and topped with a variety of ingredients; tomato and basil, vegetable or meat pates, cured meats or truffles and cheese (Ohrback, 2006). Tuscans are known for their fresh hand stretched pasta such as pappardelle and pici, as well as their stuffed pasta; tortellini and ravioli. Tuscan pasta differs from southern pasta as it is fresh, not dried. Fresh pastas are made with eggs and must be eaten within two days; however dried pastas are not made with eggs and have a shelf life of over a year (Alexander, 2000).

Olive oil in Tuscany is considered to be one of the most important ingredients. Because Tuscans like to keep their meal simple and are not fond of heavy sauces, olive oil is used daily to drizzle over pastas, breads and vegetables, used as dressings for salads and is also used for cooking numerous products. Tuscan’s olive oil production is low compared to other regions such as Puglia or Sicily in the south. However, it is regarded as

some of the highest quality olive oil produced in all of Italy with Tuscany’s extra virgin olive oil topping the list. (Costanzia, 2009).

Due to the different olive trees, soil and weather, olive oil in Tuscany is much lighter and more delicate than southern olive oil. Tuscans participate in a traditional dish called pinzimonio which is similar to Piedmonts famous bagna cauda. The difference in Tuscany’s version is that the olive oil is not heated and is mixed with vinegar. A different selection of vegetables are also provided to dip in the sauce; artichoke, endive, tomatoes, asparagus, carrots and radishes (Kistioukovitch, 2009). Located in the lagoon situated on the Tuscan coast one can find a selection of bass, tuna, trout and eel.

These fish are often grilled and eaten on their own or found is soups. Eel is a favourite of Tuscans and is eaten cold after it is fried with breadcrumbs, garlic and olive oil (Kistioukovitch, 2009). Tuscan’s are very fortunate to have a selection of fish in their diet as there is also a strong presence of meat. Meats such as rabbit, duck, pheasant and chicken are often found on Tuscan farms and are stuffed inside ravioli or eaten on its own (Alexander, 2000). The meat that stands above the rest in Tuscany is the Chianina ox.

Using the meat of the ancient ox raised in the Chianti valley, Tuscany’s most prized dish is called bistecca alla fiorentina. Cut from the loin of the cattle, this piece of steak must weigh at least 450 grams and is usually grilled on both sides for about five minutes without any seasonings or

salts (Costanzia, 2009). Tuscany is world famous for their quality pork products: specifically cured meats. Some of their cured products are finocchiona which is a salami flavoured with fennel seeds, prosciutto di Toscana which is ham that has been cured for over nine months and has a stronger taste than that of the Parma region (Ohrback, 2006).

Lardo di colonnata is the most famous cured meat of Tuscany. What makes lardo di colonnata different from other cured meats is the preservation of the pork in Colonnata’s marble quarries. These quarries are rubbed with garlic and herbs, then fatty pieces of pork are massaged with sea salt and are placed inside the hollow cavities. A layer of fresh local rosemary, sage and garlic, cracked black pepper and more sea salt are placed on top of the first layer of pork and the process is repeated.

After the layering is finished the tub is closed with a marble slab and is left for over six months (Kistioukovitch, 2009). Sheep that graze the valley in Tuscany are used to produce pecorino Toscano cheese. The aging process starts anywhere from twenty days, for a soft delicate flavoured cheese to over four months, for a semi-firm intense flavour cheese. One thing that differentiates pecorino from other cheeses is that the rinds of the cheese are often different colours. This is because Tuscans line the inside of the mould with tomato paste, for a red rind and charcoal, for a black rind (Costanzia, 2009).

Taste of Southern Italy: Sicily Southern cooking is considered to be the healthiest form of the Italian Mediterranean diet. Southern culture lies deep in

the rituals of celebrating food with family. A southerner’s day is organized in relation to food; harvesting, cooking meals and of course eating. Olive oil is used exclusively as a cooking fat, many forms of pasta are adored, a wide variety of citrus fruits and vegetables are grown and the proximity of the seas lends itself to the primary means of obtaining fish as a protein.

This section will discuss the traditional foods and dishes found in southern Italy, as represented by Sicily and their domestic capacity to produce these foods. Southern regions and Sicily in particular are poorer than most northern regions. Although their food may be considered humble this does not stop Sicilians from getting together with family and friends, hugging, kissing on the cheeks and celebrating every occasion with food (Roden, 1990). Influences from Greeks, Romans, Normans, Arabs and North Africans make Sicilian food the most diverse and aromatic in Italy.

Food produced in Sicily is said to have vibrant colour and intense flavours, this is largely due to the radiant sun, the volcanic soil, and the fact that Sicily is surround by three seas (Kistioukovitch, 2009). Due to its topography, Sicily is a large producer of cereals, hard wheat or semolina being their major product. This wheat is exported to other region of Italy to help in the production of pasta and bread. Even though Sicily is a main supplier of wheat for Italy, their bread traditions are not as prevalent as those of Tuscany.

Breads in Sicily differ as they are often filled with other ingredients such as guastedde, filled with calf’s spleen and malateddi, filled with

minced pork (Riley, 2007). Although there have been many conflicting stories of the origin of pasta, historians believe that it was brought to Sicily first. Unlike the northern regions Sicilian pasta is called dry pasta due to their cultivation of hard wheat on the island. Sicilians eat typical pastas of the main land of Italy such as maccheroni and vermicelli however they are known for a wide selection of their own hand made dried past.

Taccuna is indigenous to the area and gets it dark colour by cuttlefish ink. Sicily is also known for such tubular pastas as macaroni or crosetti which are cannelloni made with semolina and fussili, a spiral shaped pasta (Alexander, 2000). The Sicilian diet mostly consists of vegetables and is therefore considered the most important food in Italy. Eggplant and artichokes are among their favourites and grow abundantly on the island. These along with peppers, zucchini, pumpkins, and local kinds of cauliflower and broccoli are often grilled over charcoal and tossed with regional olive oil and fresh parsley (Riley, 2007).

The hills of Sicily are dotted with orange, mandarin and lemon tree orchards. Other fruits include peaches, figs and prickly pears. One of Sicily’s prized products is their selection of nuts; eighteen types of almonds, one of Sicily’s largest exports, pistachios, walnuts, pine nuts and hazelnuts (Riley, 2007). Sicily is also a producer of olive oil with about 155,000 hectares of land covered with olive trees representing about 15% of Italy’s olive oil cultivation. Not only are olive trees more abundant in the south than the north but Sicilian olive oil produces more of an aromatic flavour compared to

Tuscany’s fruity flavour.

Another differentiating factor of Sicily’s olive oil is they are the second top region of organic cultivation (Crescimanno, Di Marco & Guccione, 2002). Sicilians turn to the Tyrrhenian, Mediterranean and Ionian Sea to find their main source of protein: saltwater fish. A Sicilian’s typical diet is composed of more fish than meats which is contrary to northern diets such as Piedmont. Sicilian’s most predominant fish are swordfish and tuna as well as sawfish, mackerel, and sardines (Kistioukovitch, 2009). In ritual, Sicilians once harpooned swordfish while chanting Greek songs, a tradition from the Byzantines.

However nowadays swordfish is caught by nets, much like tuna as Sicilians believe it has a more rich and full flavour. Sword fish is rich in protein, healthy fats and vitamins and is versatile in the kitchen (Costanzia, 2009). Because Sicilian’s meat production is low and therefore minimal cured meats, Sicilians like to preserve their fish in oil or salt as an alternative. The exporting of salt is a big industry in Sicily. Since Sicily is surrounded by a variety of seas each salt offers a different flavour making Sicilian salt one of the most prized commodities in Europe (Kistioukovitch, 2009).

Sheep and cattle are allowed to wildly graze the hills of Sicily but are not often eaten as the constant movement between mountain and coasts gives the meat a tough texture. However, as sheep and cattle graze they eat the aromatic herbs over the island lending a scrumptious flavour to the milk they produce (Roden, 1990). This milk is then turned into cheese such as Sicily’s most popular cheeses ragusano and ricotta. Ragusano is typically

aged from four months to about a year but can also be eaten fresh. This cheese is shaped into a rectangular form by using wooden blocks before it is placed into brine to age.

Matured regusano is great for grating overtop of pastas and salads and softer version are typically used for grilling. Ricotta cheese has a creamy texture and is made by gathering left over whey, boiling it, skimming it and then hanging it in cheesecloth to drain. Ricotta along with chocolate and candied fruit is used as a cream filling in a fried biscuit in one of Sicily’s signature dessert dishes, cannoli (Costanzia, 2009). Italian Diet: A Mediterranean Perspective Geography, culture, history and climate are all factors that affect Italy’s version of the Mediterranean diet.

The Mediterranean diet consists of a moderate consumption of dairy products usually in the form of cheese, a healthy serving of vegetables and fruits, unrefined cereals and nuts, minimal use of red meat, with increased consumption of fish and olive oil as their only source of fat (Karampola, Panandreou, & Makedou, 2011; Fidanza & Alberti, 2005). The Mediterranean diet is said to be one of the healthiest diets as it is high in omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants, essential minerals and vitamins among many others.

Studies have shown that when Italians follow their Mediterranean diet many health benefits ensue such as an increase in life expectancy or longevity, reduction in cardiovascular morbidity, reduction in certain types of cancer and improvement in mental health conditions (Karampola et al. , 2011). Unfortunately, due to the increase in fast food and westernized practices, the Mediterranean diet is at risk

of being abandoned. Therefore, a set of food standards must be put into place in order to sustain such the health and cultural tradition of the Italian Mediterranean diet.

Sustainability of the Italian Mediterranean Diet The Italian agri-food system has put in place a set of standards in order to protect and sustain the quality of Italian food products. Focusing on three areas; traditional local food, origin of food and the production process ensure high quality of Italian food (Costanzia, 2009). Having a controlled process allows for the traceability of a product from the hand of the farmer through all the processes necessary to arrive at the consumer. This also ensures that all health and safety standards are upheld during each level of processing.

The European Union had classified three levels of certification for ‘typical’ products of a specific area: Denominazione di Origine Protetta (DOP), Indicazione geograpfica protettata (IGP) and Specialita tradizionale grantita (STG) (Costanzia, 2009). DOP refers to the designation of protected origin of a product. After meticulous inspection and continuous control, a product receiving a DOP stamps signifies that the product is produced and processed exclusively in a specific geographic region. IGP refers to products that are special to a region but are made with materials from a different region.

Finally, SGT or guaranteed traditional speciality refers to foods produced by traditional methods and not necessarily related to a specific area of origin (Costanzia, 2009; Riley, 2007). These labels help keep products in Italy sustainable as “ the logo guarantees to an establishment that has won it the legal right to protection from inferior competition and imitation of its food

product, because it has been proven, after rigorous scrutiny, to fulfil an exactly specified definition” (Riley, 2007, p. 160). Another concept that has led to the sustainability of Italian food products has been the Slow Food movement.

After fast food began to rapidly grow in Italy, locals and tourist stopped supporting local producers which in turn almost led to the extinction of Italy’s national heritage (Riley, 2007). Something had to be done in order to preserve the cultural traditions of Italian food before it was lost forever and in 1989 the Slow Movement commenced in the effort to stop fast food from endangering Italy (Kostioukovitch, 2009). The Slow Food movement encouraged tourists to travel off the beaten track to taste flavours of Italy they have never experienced.

It also allowed small producers to make their products available a larger customer base as “support for quality, sustainability, biodiversity, could be organized and publicized world wide” (Riley, 2007, p. 502). The Slow Food movement has gained increasing interest throughout Italy’s neighbouring countries and is now a global phenomenon (Kostioukovitch, 2009). Conclusion To say that Italian food is typically defined as pizza and pasta would be very narrow minded and naive. In order to discover the typical cuisine of Italy one must look at each region separately as cuisines vary from cost to mainland, north to south and city to city.

In relation to geography, starches, fats, fruits, vegetables, proteins and dairy, the differences from region to region and their domestic capacity to produce these ingredients where explored. Due to the vast amount of regions in Italy, Piedmont, Tuscany, and Sicily were discussed as a

representation of north, central, and southern cooking in Italy. An exploration of the health benefits and sustainable practices of the Italian Mediterranean diet are necessary in order to preserve a cuisine that is rich in culture, heritage and tradition.

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Inspired by Italian Food: A Writer’s Muse

4:49 PM EST on March 4, 2023

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Award-winning novelist and Appetito Editor-in-Chief Andrew Cotto shares how Italian food inspires his work as an author.

Inside my seven novels , along with the familiar narrative essentials, there is a feast of Italian food . This happened organically as I love Italian food, and this passion extended to feeding my fictional characters.

Said passion is surely rooted in my Italian-American background. I grew up eating Italian food pretty much every day and twice on Sunday, as the mandatory lunches at my grandparents' lasted through dinner. Even though I knew I ate better than, say, my Irish friends, I wasn't quite aware of the majesty of authentic Italian cuisine until I got older.

My first career was in sales. A big part of my job was to entertain clients. My preferred method of entertainment quickly became the restaurants of New York City. Sure, I'd hit the red sauce joints for fun nights of family style platters and fiascos of Chianti; but, I also discovered higher-end, regional Italian restaurants that impressed my clients, but blew me away and began an obsession with the regional cuisine of Italy.

My first trip to my motherland was not to seek ancestry in Sicily but to feast in Tuscany and Rome. After two days in Florence, I decided to change my life: to temporarily move to Italy and become a writer. Soon enough, I was there, for one year, living in the hills south of Florence and writing my first novel, The Domino Effect , which included many references to food within the coming of age story of an Italian-American kid from Queens.

Back in New York, I wrote a second novel, Outerborough Blues: A Brooklyn Mystery , featuring a chef for a protagonist who uses his expertise with Italian cuisine as a means of communication and, as a result, characterization. This use of Italian cooking as a narrative device continues in the sequel, Black Irish Blues .

My agent at the time, aware of the effective us of food in my books, suggested putting food at the forefront of my next novel. I knew just what to do and where to go.

Cucina Tipica: An Italian Adventure is the story of a disheartened American who arrives in Italy on holiday and decides he never wants to leave. What follows is a food-filled, wine-soaked adventure, driven by the everyday accessibility of high-quality products, lovingly prepared, enjoyed with local wines. Our protagonist is transformed by the fact that eating well in Italy is a right, not a privilege, and that eating well greatly informs his overall wellness, as he is physically nourished but also emotionally empowered. He’s happy in Italy like nowhere else, and the food is the reason. Oh, the wine doesn’t hurt either. The sequel, Cucina Romana: Another Italian Adventure , expands upon the experience.

This magic of Italian food is on display in my other novels as well, including my latest, Pasta Mike: A Story of Friendship & Loss , where the nostalgia inspired by Italian food helps the protagonist reconcile profound grief.

Oh yeah, I also do a little bit of writing about Italian food in my journalism. Check out my Pinterest page .

So, as a writer of both novels and journalism, when people ask what inspires my work and my decision to pursue this challenging vocation, the answer is easy: Italian food made me do it.

Thanks for reading!

I am the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Appetito magazine. I like Italian food & drink a lot.

new york city

Stay in touch

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Essay on Italy

Students are often asked to write an essay on Italy in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Italy

Introduction to italy.

Italy is a country in Europe known for its rich history and beautiful art. It looks like a boot on the map and has seas on three sides. Many people visit Italy to see its famous cities, eat delicious food, and enjoy the lovely weather.

Famous Places

In Italy, cities like Rome, Venice, and Florence are full of old buildings and famous art. Rome has the Colosseum, an ancient arena, and Venice has canals instead of streets. Florence is the birthplace of the Renaissance, a time when art and learning grew a lot.

Italian Food

Italian food is popular all over the world. Pizza and pasta come from Italy. Italians love to use fresh ingredients like tomatoes, olive oil, and cheese. Gelato, a kind of ice cream, is a sweet treat many enjoy.

Italian Culture

Italians are known for their love of family, music, and celebrations. Football is the most popular sport. Italy also has many festivals that show its traditions and history. People from all over come to enjoy these events.

Italy is a country with a lot to offer. From its historic sites and tasty food to its vibrant culture, there’s something for everyone. It’s a place that many dream of visiting.

250 Words Essay on Italy

Italy is a country in Europe known for its rich history and beautiful landscapes. It looks like a boot on the map and has seas on three sides. Many people visit Italy to see its art, monuments, and enjoy its famous food.

The Land and Cities

Italy has mountains, hills, and beaches. The Alps are big mountains in the north, and the Apennines go down the middle. Big cities like Rome, which is the capital, Milan, and Venice are in Italy. Rome has an old stadium called the Colosseum, and Venice has water streets.

Italian culture includes famous paintings and buildings. Long ago, artists like Leonardo da Vinci made great art. Italians also love music and opera. People all over the world like Italian food like pizza, pasta, and gelato, which is Italian ice cream.

Famous Italian Festivals

In Italy, there are many festivals. One is called Carnevale, where people wear masks and costumes. Another is the Venice Film Festival, where new movies are shown.

Sports in Italy

Football, or soccer, is very popular in Italy. The Italian football team has won many important games. People also enjoy car racing, especially Formula One.

Italy is a country with lots of things to see and do. From its history and art to its food and sports, Italy has something for everyone to enjoy.

500 Words Essay on Italy

Italy is a country in Europe that looks like a high-heeled boot on the map. It is known for its interesting history, delicious food, and beautiful places. Many people visit Italy to see its art, old buildings, and to enjoy the sunny weather.

History of Italy

Long ago, Italy was home to the Romans, who built a huge empire. The city of Rome was the center of this empire. Today, you can still see old Roman buildings like the Colosseum, where gladiators fought. After the Roman Empire ended, Italy had many different rulers and was divided into smaller states for a long time. It became one country again in 1861.

Famous Italian Food

Italian food is famous all over the world. Pizza and pasta are the most popular dishes. They come in many different types with various sauces. Cheese and tomatoes are often used in Italian cooking. In Italy, people enjoy their meals with family and friends, and eating together is an important part of their culture.

Beautiful Places in Italy

Italy has many beautiful places to see. Venice is a city with canals instead of roads, and people move around in boats called gondolas. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is a tower that is not straight but tilted to one side. The countryside, especially in regions like Tuscany, has beautiful hills and vineyards where grapes are grown to make wine.

Italian Art and Culture

Italy is also famous for its art. Long ago, artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo made paintings and sculptures that are still famous today. Italian culture includes music and festivals too. Opera music started in Italy, and there are many theaters where you can watch these musical stories.

Italy’s Impact on the World

Italy has had a big impact on the world. Its history, art, and culture have influenced many other countries. Italian designers are known for making beautiful clothes and shoes, and many people like to buy Italian fashion.

Italy is a country with a rich history, tasty food, beautiful places, and a strong influence on art and fashion. It is a place where the past and present come together, and there is something interesting for everyone to see and learn. Italy teaches us about the Romans, gives us great food to eat, and shows us how beautiful our world can be.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Happy studying!