On a recent trip to Bologna (2016), I found myself drawn into the halls of the Municipal Building, tempted by a brochure I had read that suggested there was some beauty to behold inside the imposing stone edifice. Some limited signage indicated an upstairs gallery: up a steep gradated stairwell, the kind that allowed for […]
Is there something unique about the way Italians think and talk about food? For a long time social scientists made a distinction between societies that just cooked the same basic dishes every day, and those that had developed a high cuisine created by professional chefs for a nobility or other affluent group. This goes along […]
People in Italy talk about food a great deal, much more so than in other parts of the world. Whereas a British or Russian intellectual feels that an exaggerated attention to food may lower the caliber of the conversation and will primly skip over the subject, the Italian lingers over it with visible pleasure, dwelling […]
A best-selling British author, historian and academic, John Dickie is an internationally recognized specialist on many aspects of Italian history and his books have been translated into many languages. Best known for his compelling journeys into the history of Italian Mafia (Cosa Nostra: A History of The Sicilian Mafia, 2004; Mafia Brotherhoods: The Rise of […]
Italian food has come a long way in recent years. To take London as an example, the all-in ‘Italian’ restaurant serving Spaghetti Bolognese (‘Spagbol’ in common parlance), an Anglo-American invention, together with variety of other standard fare regarded as generic to all regions are now on the way out. No doubt helped by the 500,000 […]
Sometime toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Giuseppe Mormino, a resident of Alia, a town in Sicily’s Palermo province, received a letter from his brother Rosolino. Rosolino composed his letter on the other side of the Atlantic in Napoleonville, Louisiana, where the young man labored on a sugar can plantation. […]
Italian novels and non-fiction have always been spiced with an abundance of culinary references. Far from being a mere descriptive element contributing to realistic representation, food is a significant narrative ingredient in both classic and contemporary literature, enriching it with anthropological, psychological and sociological “flavors.” In his Divine Comedy (1304-21), Dante Alighieri refers to bread […]
Campo de’ Fiori is a market in Rome that a lot of people love. It is also a market that a lot of people love to hate. The open air market in Campo de’ Fiori is undeniably one of Rome’s most famous. Much of this has to do with its location. It is pretty much […]
By Katherine A. McIVER We can gain a sense of what the average (or artisan-class) person ate and what foods they preferred by looking at a few artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who was supposedly a vegetarian, or Michelangelo (1475-1564), who purportedly did not care much about food, or Pontormo (1494-1557), who kept a […]
In his fiction, Ernest Hemingway takes readers on unique sumptuous journeys to different countries and makes the sights and sounds of these places visible in front of the readers. With the eyes, ears and palate of an artist, he weaves these travel experiences into the fabric of his fiction. From his early years in Oak […]