The charm was, as always in Italy, in the tone and the air and the happy hazard of things, which made any positive pretension or claimed importance a comparative trifling experience.
– Henry James, Italian Hours
Italy
ITALY IS A COUNTRY of superlatives. It has some of the most beautiful cities, towns and villages in the world, some of the most spectacular coastline in the Mediterranean, and more fine art and architecture than anywhere else in Europe. It has also produced some of the world’s most famous artists, poets and musicians: Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Donatello, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bellini, Vivaldi and Verdi – to name a few.
One of the charms of Italy is its diversity. Each of its nineteen regions has its own atmosphere, dialect, culture and cuisine. In fact, almost every town has its own style of cooking: alla napoletana, alla milanese, alla genovese, alla fiorentina etc. This is not surprising as Italy has only been united as one country since 1861 – before then it was broken up into a patchwork of kingdoms, republics, duchies, and papal and city-states.
Italy has a long and complex history. In the second millennium B.C. most of northern Italy was inhabited by the Ligurians, while the rest of the country was occupied by various migratory Italic tribes: Sabines, Aequi, Piceri, Ombri, Latins and Messapians. By 800 B.C. much of the south was colonized by the Greeks, who called the land Magna Graecia (Greater Greece), while the Etruscans ruled the land between the Tiber and the Po. Legend has it that Romulus founded Rome in 752 B.C. By 175 B.C. the Roman Republic had overrun the Etruscans and the Greeks and spread across the entire Italian peninsular. After the Punic Wars, the Romans seized the Carthaginian territories of Sardinia, Corsica and Spain, and by A.D. 106 the Roman Empire had taken control of the whole of the Mediterranean and most of Europe south of the Rhine.
Roman cooking was greatly inspired by the cooking of Ancient Greece, Asia Minor and Etruria. A staple of the Roman diet was puls or pulmentum – a kind of porridge usually made with barley, millet or spelt – that the Romans adopted from the Etruscans. Pulmentum was the forerunner of polenta – now made with cornmeal – that is still eaten in much of northern Italy today. The poor of Rome had little cooking equipment and often suffered fuel shortages. They ate a good quantity of uncooked food such as olives, raw beans, figs and a kind of cottage cheese made with ewe’s milk, with pulmentum or, as milling processes improved, with coarse bread. They also ate a variety of herbs and greens, especially nettles, chard and mallow.
The food of the rich was, of course, another matter. Roman banquets were renowned for their lavishness. Foodstuffs were imported from all over the Empire: pomegranates from Persia, apricots from Armenia and pickles from Spain. Other sought-after delicacies included elephant trunks, flamingo’s tongues, peacock’s brains, camel’s feet, well-fattened hedgehogs, dormice and snails. The Romans were also keen agriculturists and produced a wide variety of vegetables: turnips, carrots, leeks, sorrel, broccoli, onions, cucumbers, radishes, cress, endive, numerous varieties of peas, horseradish, rocket, the finest asparagus in the ancient world – and cabbage, which they regarded as a panacea.
The Romans liked to disguise the taste of their food with strongly flavoured sauces such as liquamen, or garum as it was sometimes called. The exact ingredients are disputed but it was very salty and usually contained the entrails of red mullet, horse mackerel or anchovies. They were also very fond of spices and sweet and sour sauces made with pine nuts, sultanas, grapes, mint, vinegar, wine and musk – which roughly ressemble the agro dolce sauces that are still in use in Italy today. Cheesecake was invented by the Romans, as well as the omelette, which derives from ova mellita (honeyed eggs).
The collapse of the Roman Empire was followed by wave after wave of invasions, by Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Lombards and the Franks. In the ninth century, Sicily was overrun by the Saracens. The Saracens introduced new irrigation systems and set up the first rice plantation in Europe near Lentini in south-west Sicily. They also brought the aubergine, spinach, buckwheat (still called saraceno in Italian), dates, pistachios, sugar cane, oranges and the lemon – which quickly replaced verjus (the juice of unripe grapes) in sauces and dressings. The Saracens also taught the Sicilians the art of making ice cream and sherbets, and introduced various sweet pastries and cakes including cassata, the well-known Sicilian sponge cake filled with sweetened ricotta and crytallised fruit. The name cassata derives from the Arabic qas’ah, the deep-sided dish in which it was originally baked.
When the Crusaders set off in the Middle Ages to rescue the Holy Land from the grip of Islam, they were often transported in Venetian ships. Venetian merchants returned with cargoes of silks, dyes, perfumes and spices from the East: cinnamon, cloves, saffron, ginger, cardamom and pepper – which was so highly prized it was worth its weight in gold. Fortunes were made. Genoa and Pisa also prospered on the Spice Trade, but the power and wealth of Venice was unrivalled. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Republic of Venice had taken control of Istria and most of the Dalmatian coast, as well as a string of Greek islands including Corfu and Crete. After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 the Spice Trade was threatened and Venice was forced to trade with Muslims in the Near East. Prices soared – which was the main incentive for the Portuguese to find new trade routes to the East by circumventing Africa.
At the same time the Renaissance – the rebirth of the art and ideas of Ancient Greece – brought a renewed interest in the culinary arts. The first printed cookbook, De Honestate Voluptate ac Valetudine (‘Concerning Honest Pleasure and Well-Being’), written by Bartolomeo Scappi (also known as Platina), was published in Cremona around 1475. In it, Platina recommended starting meals with fresh fruit. He also preferred to season food with lemon or orange juice, or wine, rather than the Roman excessive use of spices. Many of his recipes are very simple and healthy such as broad bean or squash soup poured over slices of bread.
At the height of the Renaissance, Florence had the most sophisticated cuisine in Europe. In 1533, when Catherine de Medici married the Dauphin who became Henry II of France, she took her Florentine cooks to the French court. They taught the French the art of making fine pastries and cakes such as frangipane, macaroons and cream puffs. They also introduced the French to a variety of vegetables including artichokes, broccoli, Savoy cabbages and tiny peas, which the French quickly adopted as their own.
Gradually new food stuffs appeared from the New World. The first sack of corn was brought to Venice in the sixteenth century via Turkey. The Venetians, thinking the new grain was Turkish, called it granturco, which corn is still called in Italy today. Haricot beans soon took preference over broad beans – especially in Tuscany where they became so popular that Tuscans became known as mangiafagioli (bean eaters). Both the potato and the tomato were initially thought to be poisonous and were not widely used in cooking until the eighteenth century.
Italian cooking today is regional cooking. Each of Italy’s nineteen regions has its own style of cooking. The elegant cuisines of Emilia and the Veneto are very different from the rustic cooking of Apulia and Sardinia. Foreign influences, too, are still apparent – French in Lombardy, Piedmont and the Val D’Aosta, Austrian in Trentino and the Alto Adige, Central European in Venezia Giulia, Spanish in Naples and the south, and Arab in Sicily.
There is also a dichotomy between the cooking of the north and that of the south. In the north there is a liking for soft, flat ribbons of pasta rich in eggs, while hard, tubular factory-made pasta predominates in the south. Traditionally, olive oil was the main cooking medium of southern Italy, while pork fat was used in the centre and butter in the north, where the land was more suited to cattle rearing than the growing of olives. Today, less pork fat is eaten and the use of olive oil has become more widespread. Tomato sauces strongly flavoured with garlic, basil, oregano, chilli, olives and capers, so fundamental to the cooking of the south, are seldom used in the north. In some regions of northern Italy, especially Lombardy and the Veneto, rice and polenta are eaten more than pasta.
Vegetables, too,