The Rest Is History - 484. The Food that Changed the World

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

The unexpected evolution of Italian food can serve as a tantalising doorway into some of the greatest moments of Italian history: from medieval monarchs, murdered popes, and the Renaissance, to secret societies, and Mussolini’s fascist propaganda. Yet the history of Italian food is also riddled with myths and ambiguities, particularly the rustic, romantic idea of it as deriving in the homes of rural peasants. In truth, though the distinctive culinary identity of different Italian cities endures - rising and falling with the fates of their cosmopolitan foundations - the beloved Italian staples of today bear little resemblance to their historical antecedents. For instance, Venetian food was once renowned for its Middle Eastern spices, and an alarming quantity of eels, sweetbreads and sugar is recorded from a feast in Renaissance Ferrara. When was it, then, that Italian food developed its unique identity and reputation? Can it in any way be traced back to the food of the Roman Empire? Did pasta really originate in China before being brought to Europe by Marco Polo? And, does margarita pizza really originate in the whims of a famous 19th century queen? In today’s episode, Dominic and Tom are joined by historian John Dickie to indulge in a colourful journey through the piquant history of Italian food, dispelling and corroborating a few enshrined myths and legends as they go… _______ *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York.  *The Rest Is History LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall* Tom and Dominic, accompanied by a live orchestra, take a deep dive into the lives and times of two of history’s greatest composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Do you want to know what a pizza is? It is a focaccia made from leavened bread dough, which is toasted in the oven. On top of it they put a sauce with a little bit of everything when its colors are combined. The black of the toasted bread, the sickly white of the garlic, an anchovy, the greeny yellow of the oil and the fried greens, and the bits of red here and there from the tomato. They make a pizza look like a patchwork of greasy filth that harmonizes perfectly with the appearance of the person that's selling it. So that, Dominic, of course, was Halo Holodi, the author of The Adventures of Pinocchio.

And he was writing in 1886 about something called pizza. Beautiful accent, Tom. Tuscan accent. Yeah, a Tuscan accent, which of course, people familiar with the various dialects of Italy will have picked up from my dropping of the hard C. Did you notice that, Dominic? I did. I did. Because Holodi was a son of a cook from Florence, wasn't he? So he took his food very seriously, took his Tuscan accent very seriously, and did not take pizza seriously. He despised pizza.

Dominic, what do you think he would make of the global success today of pizza? I think he'd be stupefied, wouldn't he? He'd be appalled. Do you think he'd be appalled? A patchwork of greasy filth. I mean, I think his position is quite clear, isn't it? I guess. I guess.

I mean, we are not the people to ask about this. But fortunately, we're joined on the podcast by an old friend of the rest of his history, the professor of Italian studies at University College London, John Dickey. Top Freemason expert. Top Freemason expert, but also the author of Delizia, the epic history of Italians and their food. John, welcome to the show. What did you make of Tom's Tuscan accent, first of all? Well, I take all the blame because of course I tried to coach him

in the rudiments of Tuscan pronunciation. But yeah, not a bad stab. Even my laziest students will be encouraged now by those efforts. So, John, we're very glad to have you back on the podcast, not least because your great claim to fame, apart from being a top historian of Italy, is that you're the only person who's listened to all 11 episodes of the series about Custer and the Sioux.

Or as they would say in Tuscany, Huster. Huster. It was, I loved it. The deep dive, the hour by hour narrative was excellent. Oh, this is very good. You can definitely come again. So, I mean, your book is The Epic History of Italians and Their Food, and we're going to be condensing that epic history into the next 45 minutes to an hour or so. I mean, an obvious point to make is that Italy, you know, it's a

language not just of regional dialects, or indeed, I guess you would have said regional languages before the 19th century, but regional cuisine. So is there even such a thing as Italian food? Yeah, I think there is. I mean, remember also that the regions are a relatively recent administrative invention in the 1970s, a lot of them. We're talking about much more complicated patterns of diversity than that. If you think of Naples, Naples is the capital of a whole kingdom, essentially carved out by the Normans in the 11th century. And that makes its cuisine have a different shape to the cuisine of, you know, the central areas of Italy or indeed Rome

as the capital of the papacy. So even the idea of Italian food as regional is a very simplistic map. But I would say, yes, Italian food does exist. And it exists in the form of a kind of up by people in cities and kind of spread around the world. But you say that's not the case at all. There's a paradox here because I think one of the reasons why Italian food has become so successful is because Italians are so devoted to believing that kind of nonsense. Right. But there's really no evidence for it. You know, this sort of, you know, Italian peasants playing football in the Olive Grove version of Italian history. they tried to do was find out more about the peasantry and so on.

It's a sort of avalanche of documentation over the next 60, 70 years, and it all comes to the conclusion that the peasants not only ate badly, but didn't even know how to cook the few things they had to eat. The fact that the average height of the Italian grew by four centimetres from the late 50s to the mid 70s, when the economic miracle happened and that long, long history of peasant hunger came to an end, tells you something about how we misperceive Italian food history. Just following up on that, cities in Italy go back to the Roman period. Is it possible to trace a history of Italian food back through the fall of the Roman Empire to the Roman period,

or not really? I don't think so, because I tried to do it, and you can't. Remember, some of those cities, particularly in the South, are older. Messina is older than Rome itself and Naples and so on, the Greek cities of the Southern Islands. So what the classical world has bequeathed to contemporary Italy is what they call the hundred cities of Italy, these local Italian dishes that carry the names of cities. Pizza la Napoletana, Bistecca la Fiorentina, Risotto alla Milanese and so on and so on and so on. Parmigiano from Parma. That tells you something about the way that these cities produced foods and almost gave them a sort of urban branding as they were exchanged with other cities. That's where Italian food history happens. That's where the documents are and the stories and so on and so forth. So let's start with the first city you talk about, which actually is perhaps an unexpected city, which is Palermo, the capital of Sicily. So you kick off in 1154 in the reign of Roger II, the kind of Norman-Arab-Byzantine fusion

of Sicily. And you start here because this is the arrival of the one thing that everybody associates with Italian food, which is pasta, or rather dried pasta. So the fact that it's dried pasta, not fresh, that's the key, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. Pasta, which is not a word, you know, it just means dough or paste. And it only really comes to mean what we mean by pasta relatively recently. And what we mean by pasta includes all kinds of things like tortellini, which are little pies. That's what they mean. They're tiny little pies, filled pastas that are cooked by boiling. Lasagna. And all of these have different histories. But the one that is most, if you like, identified with Italy, even by Italians, is the dried variety, the stuff that fills supermarket shelves, made with durum wheat. And the first document that testifies to the arrival of that on Italian soil dates from

Roger II's reign in Palermo in 1154. And it comes from a geographer, Alidrizi was his name. He was an Arabic-speaking geographer, part of this extraordinary fusion court of Roger II, you know, with Greeks, Jews and Arabs and Normans moving together to run this kingdom. And he was the sort of one of the intellectual stars of this court. And he was commissioned to produce a planisphere, a great sort of silver domed map of the known world as a sort of advert for Roger's power and a book to go with it, which describes, you know, everything from the sort of desert islands of Scotland in the north to the sort of sandblasted unknown of Africa. And when he gets close to the Palermo capital, he starts obviously to get into more detail. And he goes to a place called Trabilla, which is just along the coast from Palermo, which is a centre famous

for its springs and river courses. There he says that there is, and he uses the term factory, my Arabic is non-existent, but it's definitely a centre of large-scale production for export. Producing this stuff he calls ytria, and that is still used as an Italian word for a particular type of pasta called trie, and it is short bits of dried durum wheat spaghetti, which, according to this geographer, Ali Drizi, is made in huge amounts and exported all over the place, particularly all up and down the coast of Italy from Genoa right round to Naples and so on.

And that's where it arrives, and it arrives there from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean that we don't know. There's a long history of noodles. Chinese noodles are thousands of years old. But if you really want to be terminologically specific about it, that's where pasta history really kicks off. So, John, you mentioned Chinese noodles. I mean, one of the most famous myths about Italian food is that actually pasta comes from China and is introduced by Marco Polo. But clearly, if it's originating in the United States because that story was actually invented for the first time by the Pasta Manufacturers Association of the United States in their industry magazine in 1929, this story, which then for some mysterious reason took off and got made into a movie in the 30s. And so with this pasta anecdote, and I think the reason there is they really wanted

to make pasta less Italian, so less greasy and Mediterranean and foreign and to make it more universal so they could sell more of it into the american market it was an italian produced pastor obviously and that was the origin of the story just looking through the books in the next chapters you turn north to the late medieval city states milan venice and so on you have a lot of stuff about different cookbooks or books describing the cities so there's's a book in Milan in 1288, there's a book in Venice, Libro per Cuoco in the mid-1300s. But they didn't really mention pasta particularly. So in Milan, it's all about fruit and vegetables.

And in Venice, the big thing there are spices, obviously, because of Venice's position in the spice trade. So at that point, pasta is not at all emblematic of Italian cuisine specifically, is it? No, I don't think so it takes a long while to acquire that sense of signifying a place and a people and it starts to signify sicilians from about the sort of 15th century sicilians are known by other italians as mangia macaroni macaroni eatersaroni is the most widespread term for pasta, this kind of dried pasta in this period. And then it makes a very important transition we can talk about later to Naples. And Naples is really where it becomes hugely popular and emblematic. I mean, you find it even in medieval cookbooks in Britain. So it is travelling. And

by the Renaissance period, it's in lots and lots and lots of recipes. I mean, one of the great themes of your book is people are always looking for authentic Italian food. You know, don't be like Jamie Oliver and put chorizo on a paella, that kind of thing. You know, you've got to get back to the original Bolognese recipe or pesto or whatever. And you point out what tosh this all is. So if you'd gone back to Venice for the original Venetian food, it's not kind of liver and onions, but it's more like Indian food, right? Heavily spiced, be like having a biryani or a korma or something. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, this is not just true of Italy, although Italy with Venice and so on is hugely important you know it's where europe

gets its spices it's why venice became so rich yeah and they love their spices partly because of taste partly because it's got good snob value it's sort of food bling but they also love it for health reasons for galenic health reasons you know that this idea of balancing the humans. And right up to the sort of 16th, 17th century in Italy, this idea of spices with their heat balancing out the dangers of cold, wet foods is absolutely fundamental to the way food is thought about, to the link, which is a very ancient one, between food and medicine and food and improving your health and so on and so forth. So on that, you cite a Vatican librarian in the 15th century, Platina, who's an extraordinary man, and maybe we'll come to his career in a minute,

but he's very interested in the idea that food can also be medical. So you quote him on bear meat, that it isn't good for the spleen or liver but can prevent hair loss so that's maybe something for dominic to bear in mind yeah thank you and also he's very very into aphrodisiac foods isn't he so he writes of dozens of ingredients and dishes that stir the libido from pine nuts to partridge from chickpeas to golden balls which we would call french toast broad beans stimulate lust because they look like testicles apparently onions taken in small doses arouse sexual appetite and increase its nourishment with lustful dampness. And oysters are valuable to the libidinous because they arouse even deadened passion. People still think that about oysters, but not about onions.

No, they don't. So what's the librarian in the Vatican doing, going on about all this? He's a very, very interesting character. I mean, this is the pattern of my whole book. All too often, food historians who are essentially kind of cooks trying to be historians want to kind of break into these sources and sort of burgle them for come out with this amazing range of characters and stories which, yes, tell you about eating and largely how different it was, the different things it meant in the past, but also these characters like Platon, who was a humanist.

You know, humanists were these scholars of the classical world who invented the Renaissance as a narrative. Here it is, you know, it's saying to the guys in power in these newly wealthy Italian cities, if you hire us, we can teach you all the great lessons of the classical world and you can become as famous as Julius Caesar and whatever. And there will be a rebirth, a renaissance in Italian culture. And that's the narrative they sell. And his cookbook is very much in the lines of that narrative. He's saying, look, we can take on board all this classical learning.

He borrows various sources from the classical world and shows off all his quotations and learned allusions. While also saying, well, actually, you know what? We can also do better than that. In the classical world, they didn't have blancmange. For example, we love our blancmange, which is not the blancmange that we know today. Blancmange is bianco mangiare, which is pounded capon and almonds,

had to be made as white as possible white and yellow for purity they were the best possible things you could eat at the time tons of sugar tons of spices that was considered the ultimate in food refinement at the time and the sign that italy was now having sort of used the classical world as a launch pad, taking off into a new era of fame and greatness. Platinum was also a member of this obsessive secret academy of like-minded humanist scholars who got up to all kinds of things, having sort of toga parties and all that kind of stuff. Sounds great fun. Sounds like an absolute hoot.

Although the book is full of jibes against his mates, sounds like they weren't actually all that friendly and there was quite a lot of rivalry going on. That's just academics though, isn't it? Yes, exactly like that. And he subsequently got arrested for plotting to kill the Pope. And we still don't know whether there was any truth in this because when that Pope who arrested him died, he was made Vatican librarian

and he destroyed all the records relating to his trial and imprisonment. The book has a history of Italy through its food as much as it is a history of Italian food. That's why I enjoyed it so much. You get these stories that food becomes a doorway into. So John, could I just pick up on that? You say it was not until the Renaissance that Italians became aware they were eating in a style that distinguished them from foreigners. So what is it about the Renaissance that makes that? Is it to do with the

fact that they're looking back to classical exemplars? Is it because they're getting richer and they've got more material to work with? What is it that by this point is distinguishing them from other regions in Europe? They know that they're leaders in fashion, in European courts and so on and so forth. You remember your Chaucer episodes and how he goes to Italy and learns the latest in literary fashion from Dante and Boccaccio and people like that. You know, that's kind of happening with food as well. Remember, this is the European system of courts where this elite cuisine is being created that's quite international. And Italy is one of the engines of this. And of course, Rome, very important as well, because it's the international center of the papacy. And

in the Renaissanceissance the capital of italian food as a result you're talking about all the courts can we just go in the what i think is the best banquet in the book which is in ferrara in 1529 it's thrown by duke alfonso the first for his son ercole who's marrying the daughter of louis the 12th france and it's so long the list that we can only give a hint of the horrors so So 25 plates of boned capon coated in blancmange fried, then covered with sugar. 25 large white sausages with 104 fried sweetbreads sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. 50 pieces of salted pike in yellow imperial sauce. Fried pigeons with slices of citron.

257 pigeons in puff pastry. Here's the thing I'd never eat, 125 portions of eel in marzipan. So obviously this is bonkers to us because it's the mixture of sweet and savoury that we associate with kind of, as it were, old food. They didn't have the distinction. But the other thing to me is how it doesn't sound like your classic Italian food that everybody is familiar with. So would this at this point be, as it were, distinctively Italian, do you think? And obviously it bears no relation to what most people are eating. No. Italy was at this time, yes, a cultural concept, defined partly by the inheritance of the classical world and so on.

But the food geography was still thought of, you know, it's a very ancient notion, the idea that some areas produce better produce of a particular kind. Talking about eels, Comacchio in the Po Delta is where those eels tend to come from. So when a duke is serving eels, is he making a kind of territorial claim on the region that they've come from? Is he showing he can source stuff from all over other lands? Is that a measure of his wealth and power? It's certainly the case that you have to show off and monarchs have always wanted to do that. I talked briefly about that mosaic from Theoderic's Ravenna, where Theoderic boasts about his ability to bring all four seasons to the table at once. That is the dream. That's the heart of the whole food sort of bling, the magnificence, to use the word of the day, of Renaissance courtly cooking. But eels were a huge practical necessity because, of course, one of the key things about

food in this period, and in Italy it's particularly obsessive, is the distinction between lean days and fat days, which has completely disappeared off our map. You know, the idea of there are days when you're not allowed to eat meat, it's more holy, it begins with monasticism in the sort of early centuries of Christianity. And that becomes this obsessive argument about it, you know, how can we get around this if we redefine things as fish they live in water okay do eggs count or not there's a whole complicated debate about this thing but eels throw out an absolute lifesaver for every table because the poor things can be just stored in barrels in a little bit of water.

They can be preserved easily and so on and so forth. So you have to jazz them up in every way you possibly can. And marzipan, though, really? I mean, that's like the single worst dish I think I've ever heard of until I got to the white sausages with sugar and cinnamon. Yeah, but I'd love to see something on ITV, you going around Italy, tasting eels in marzipan, resurrecting an enthusiasm for this kind of food, because there is a sense, isn't there, that as the Renaissance turns into the Counter-Reformation and the great powers of France and England and so on

kind of rise to a greater supremacy, that Italian food as well as culture is seen as going slightly into abeyance. And is that because a supremacy in food for Italy is an expression of its culture? Yeah, at a courtly level, there's no question that Italy is marginalized from the 16th century. It becomes the sort of plaything of the great powers and court cultures. Fashions are driven further north, particularly Paris.

And it's from Paris that food fashions are revolutionized and changed. And really, we wouldn't have modern Italian cuisine without the influence of France. There's no question about it. And then, of course, you also get the new world foods arriving. You know, the shift on the center of gravity of the world economy from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic means the arrival of all of these foods, which take a long time to bed down. You know, Italians, it takes them a long time to work out what to do with tomatoes, for example, before they make it onto pizza and pasta and chocolate and things like that. Although they make quite an early appearance in Italy and southern Italy, a lot of it ruled by Spain, there's a whole food revolution this point. And when we come back, let's look at how that revolution happens, how pizza and other such dishes that are now so well-known

come to take on the form that we would recognise. We'll be back in a few minutes. Bentonato, everybody. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking Italian food and what it says about Italian history with Professor John Dickey. And, John, let's turn to a city we haven't really mentioned at all, or at least we've only mentioned in passing, which is Naples. So Naples in the 1700s is by far the biggest city in Italy.

And in your chapter about Naples, you place us with the Lazzaroni. Am I getting that right? They'd previously been broccoli eaters, but now they're rebranded macaroni eaters for their love of pasta. What is it about Naples and pasta? Why do we associate Naples specifically with pasta at this point? Yeah, this dried pasta tradition really has its capital in Naples and still does to this day. But that's a transformation. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes,

and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com, head to therestisentertainment.com That's therestisentertainment.com ...that really happens in the 17th and 18th century. Remember beforehand it was Sicilians, because this is where Jerome Wheat was grown in Sicily

and so on, who were known as Mangia Maccheroni, macaroni eaters. But that nickname switches to the Neapolitans, who stop being what they called leaf eaters or leaf shitters, which is their previous nickname when they ate meat with various varieties of broccoli. And they become Mangia Maccheroni because this megalopolis of early modern Naples has this vast rabble that needs feeding. Remember, Naples is, unlike a lot

of the rest of the kingdom, a huge city capital of a vast and ancient kingdom. And it has to deal with an era of mass politics and mass city life and finds pasta the way to do that, an easy way to feed the masses. And it can be made easily in places like Granano and so on just down the coast. But it has a hugely important cultural and symbolic meaning in this period as well. And like you say, it's associated with the Lazzaroni. This is the era of the Grand Tour. And everybody who goes to Naples has to have a theory about who these Lazzaroni are.

These are guys who loaf around in rags in the sun. This is where the idea of the dolce fargnente comes from, this languorous existence of happy poverty that these guys are supposed to embody. And the great mental image from the period of them is them eating spaghetti, as we would call it now, macaroni, with their hands, dangling it into their mouths. And the king himself does that, doesn't he? And the king himself does that, doesn't he? And the king himself does that. He even does it at the opera. King Ferdinand, who was in power for an awful long time between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Lazzaroni, were basically a kind of proletarian elite loyal to the monarchy who exercised a kind of protection racket over the political system. They were the monarch's sort of

representatives among the rabble. This macaroni came to symbolise this bond between the monarch and the masses, who the Lazzaroni were sort of chiefs of. And that's what Ferdinand was doing. It was his language of absolutism, if you like. Whereas Louis XIV builds Versailles, he eats macaroni with his hands to establish this bond with the masses. And who gets to keep his throne, I guess. Yes. What are they eating the pasta with? Not tomato-based sauces at this point? No, largely pork fat. The tomatoes don't arrive until quite

a lot later. So the pork fat, we don't associate that at all with Naples. That's kind of Bologna or somewhere. Why did that die out? Well, just fast forwarding quite a lot, we associate Italian food and Italians associate Italian food with the Mediterranean diet. La dieta mediterranea, that's the great watchword of contemporary Italian cuisine. The Mediterranean diet was actually invented by an American scientist in the 1950s. So basically everything seems to be invented by Americans. From the late 19th, early 20th century, something crazy like sort of seven and a half million Italians emigrate to the New World.

And the cultural exchange there, back and forth, not even to mention episodes like the Second World War and so on, has a huge influence on Italian cuisine. This particular scientist, Ancel Keys, was his name. He was the one who invented the K-rations that American troops had in the Second World War. And it was an epidemiologist working on the link between animal fats and cholesterol and heart attacks and stuff. And in order to kind of monetize his academic research, which is something, of course, I'd thoroughly disapprove of, he and his wife wrote this cookbook that they branded as the Mediterranean diet in the 1970s. And that's how it took off. But, of course, he says it himself. This isn't the Mediterranean diet in the 1970s. And that's how it took off. But of course,

he says it himself, this isn't a Mediterranean diet because we've completely taken pork fat out of it and all of these other elements to make it look more like the kind of thing we associate with Italian food today. So they're having their pasta and their pork fat, but they are not having pizzas in Naples. Well, they are having pizzas, but they're not like the pizzas that we know. So they have a thing which is like a kind of focaccia. The word probably related to the Greek word for pita and the Turkish word pide. That's where it comes from, I'm guessing. We're guessing, yeah.

The thing is flatbreads. People putting discs of dough onto hot stones, you know, that's so ancient that what's specific about it sort of vanishes into nothing almost. But it does in the 19th century start to become associated again with this culture of eating in the street of these ragged Neapolitan masses. And that's where people start to observe it in the middle of the 19th century. Alexandre Dumas, the Three Musketeers author, is one of the first people to pick it up. And there we do start to get traces of tomato as well as bits of anchovy and stuff. It's just a flavouring. And it's very, very much associated with the low city of Naples, the poorest, most overcrowded quarters of the city. And it's street food, but not in a good way. Can I ask you then about probably the most famous of all pizzas, the pizza margarita, which is actually named after a queen, isn't it? So how does that come about? Okay, Naples in the 19th century inspires horror and disgust because of cholera. Cholera arrives in Europe in

I think 1820s, 1830s, and Naples, because of its hygienic conditions, its overcrowding, its poverty, and so on, so on, is particularly vulnerable to it. I think there are something like eight outbreaks in the 19th century. And that's why nobody would dream of eating pizza. We began with the quote from Carlo Collodi, the author of The Adventures of Pinocchio, who, again, wrote about pizza. And he wasn't remotely the only one. It's something absolutely abhorrent and disgusting and associated with the city of Naples. And there was a huge outbreak of cholera in 1884 in Naples, very, very politically dangerous moment. The wealthy, the middle classes just abandoned the city. And the king of the day, King Umberto, with his wife, Margherita, went to the city. Actually, Umberto I, Margherita, went a couple of days later when they were kind of rebuilding the city to build on their popularity naples has always had a kind of monarchical feeling about it that

continued for a long time and part of margarita's image she was a highly fashionable you know there was even a fashion magazine named after in the period she She was a real lifestyle leader. And it seems that pizza acquired its name, Pizza Margherita, that is, around that time as a sort of city's homage to these monarchs who had actually visited the city in its hour of need. Isn't there a story that there's one guy, Rafael Esposito, who runs a bakery in the Spanish Quarter and he makes three pizzas? One with whitebait, one just with olive oil, and one with the classic mozzarella. And she liked number three, and that's how it got the name.

Is that true or is that an urban myth? That's another complete fake story, I'm afraid. One of the many, many. I mean, writing Italian food history is really like machine- gunning anchovies in a tin. You know, there are so many of these myths around. And that is one of them. Unfortunately, there is the Pizzeria Brandi, a famous pizzeria in Naples, which has this letter, which is supposedly original of Queen Margarita saying thank you for these lovely pizzas. And that's a fake.

Are you personally, are you able to visit Italy? There's not an embargo against you or something, like stamping on all these. Right. Yeah, you've got the Masons getting you. Now you've got Italian foodies. Yeah, I know. Those who've read the book will know it's got a higher body count

than my history with the Mafia. This book, Dilettù, got made into a TV series in Italy, a six-part series, me presenting in it. Seemed to go down very, very well. I don't know why, but it's since become much, much more controversial because one of the dogs that didn't bark of Italian food is people pinning political identity to Italian food. And that's begun to happen with the current fascist nostalgic government trying to use this idea of Italy's traditional Mediterranean peasant food. Which you're saying is an American idea?

Completely. So irony is piled on irony? Yeah, absolutely. So could I just ask you about the attitude of the fascists, so the original fascists, Mussolini, to to food because he's actually not particularly interested in at all no no the fascists didn't like food they ideally would have reduced the italian diet to olive stones and gristle if they could have done the idea was that these italians there's new spartans or something marching to a new Mediterranean empire.

And, you know, Mussolini, he had a gastroduodenal ulcer, which tortured him for most of his political life. And he didn't like being photographed eating, preferred to be the sportsman and so on and so forth. They tried to promote rice. They had a battle for grain as, you know, this idea of self-sufficiency of Italian food production under fascism in preparation for this war that they wanted from the beginning. And Italian food, particularly pasta, just didn't fit into that because one of the terrible secrets of Italian pastries would be pretty much impossible to have an Italian pasta culture on the scale without importing grain from places like the Crimea. You know, Garibaldi had played his little role in importing grain from the

Crimea in the early 19th century when he was a sailor. But the fascists do invent the idea of the cult of the rural housewife with her traditional recipes, don't they? So that's where that comes from. That's the first time that we do start to get a bit of sort of rustic eating nostalgia there are all kinds of rustic pastoral forms of poetry and opera and so on going on before that but there's really very very little trace of anybody being crazy enough to associate eating well with the countryside before the fascists start to do it. But even their efforts weren't terribly convincing. You know, they put on a big show in Rome and set up this sort of rustic village, so-called in the Circus Maximus in Rome

as part of an exhibition of fascist culture in 1938. But of course, this rustic village had all of these cuisines from Rome, from Venice, from Milan. It's an urban picture of Italy as what it is, a collection of urban cuisines. And so basically what happens then, I'm guessing, is that it is an urban idea of what the countryside should be that then starts to shape the countryside to conform to this urban vision is that what happens yeah it starts to happen once you reach the plenty in the post war period the economic miracle italy goes very very rapidly from being a peasant society to being an industrial society in the late 50s 60ss, 70s. And really, the 1970s are a key decade in this. It's a very difficult decade for Italy. It's the years of lead, of

terrorism, and all that kind of thing. The state feels corrupt. And also of environmental crises of various kinds. And it's in this period in the 1970s that you start to get rustic food nostalgia. And the idea of Italian food is this collection of ancient peasant traditions, almost all completely invented. That's when that rustic nostalgia really hits home. And you get inventions like the biscuit brand, Il Molino Bianco, the white mill. Yeah, which is just totally fabricated. So I wanted to ask you about one person that you zero in on here, which is Giovanni Rana, if I pronounced that correctly.

Yeah. He is the tortellini magnate. So tortellini, if I understand you correctly, was a Sunday food. You had it on Sundays and you had it in a broth and the sort of little pass, almost like dumplings, I guess. And he takes that and he makes it a convenience food with huge factories and stuff. But also the key to it is his marketing. Is that right?

That he markets himself. I mean, this is what people miss out completely with this rustic traditions version of Italian history is the commercial genius that is behind contemporary success of Italian food. Tortellini are medieval. They're very ancient. They're these little pies, and medieval people loved a pie, that you cook by boiling, mini pies.

So they're very ancient. And, you know, there are recipes right back into those medieval cookbooks we talked about earlier. By the post-war period, period prosperity, this sort of Sunday lunchtime treat in the brief historical existence of the classic Italian housewife. This is what they become in the post-war period. They've come from being part of the peasant labor force, moved into cities. I'm generalizing massively, obviously.

And then they get pushed into education and into the labor market again. And people can't make those things anymore. Whether they don't have the skills or most certainly they don't have the time. And Giovanni Rana in the late 60s, 70s, 80s seizes onto this. Because tortellini present a huge problem of trust what is in the filling you can put any old muck in there if you want yeah you've got to have trust and he puts his face on the packet his signature on the packet to translate that trust into the era of vacuum packing and urban living and supermarket distribution and all that kind of thing and they've become a huge success and if you buy packet tortellini from sainsbury's or whatever it is in britain they're almost certainly made by giovanni rana so john

can we just end as you said you've been um shooting anchovies in a tin here. There seem very few myths left. And yet there is a sense that there is something distinctively appealing to a frenetic modern world about Italy and Italy's food culture, the idea of slow food. Is it all just marketing and American influence and whatever? Or is there something genuinely true about it, despite everything that you've been saying? I think that that connoisseurship that is associated with urban living in Italy, that we get developing the Middle Ages, wider selection, people learning the manners and connoisseurship that go with good eating that communicates itself and is in position when people do have the resources then to rediscover and exploit these traditions you know all kinds of advertising flummery about peasant traditions and the slow

food case is that language that that process turned into politics, effectively, the politics of food. Carlo Petrini, a great friend of our current king, is the founder of this movement, found in the 80s as a sort of rebellion against fast food and the commercialization of food. So it's in Italy too, because the memory of peasant existence really wasn't that, you know, it was only a generation ago. The Italians start to capitalize that in a commercial way with the kind of commercial know-how. So the myths are mostly entirely mythical, but they do in a sense misapprehend the history which they can then put to very good commercial use and the fact remains i mean you've got a statistic in your book that there are 10 times fewer fast food outlets burger outlets or whatever in italy

than there are in britain or france or germany so italy the outliers i was thinking about what makes it a difference and i guess you could argue what makes Italy different is that it always had that network of cities and that that was the distinctive thing about it. France obviously has Paris and it has other major cities, but it doesn't have quite the same competitive world of city-states. Is that the thing? Is that what makes Italy different?

Yeah, I think so. Italy's long food history, most Italians simply weren't a part of for so long. Nevertheless, we have the sort of aspirations and a model for sophisticated eating, urban living, which is still very strongly felt in Italy. This sense of living amid these ancient stones and these artistic treasures and food has been kind of bolted onto that. I mean, I should say that Italy is vulnerable to a lot of these trends. Apparently, Italians now eat more sushi per head than anybody else in the world. And I don't know why it is that sushi made such a big impact in Italy, but Italians absolutely love it. You know, John, the peak delicacy in the Roman period for the elite was to eat kind of fish

that was almost raw because you could only have it if it was fresh from your ponds or whatever. So it was an absolute marker of status. So perhaps it's a reversion to their very ancient ruins. I like to think that that's what it is. Anyway, John, thanks so much. That was absolutely wonderful. And it's lunchtime now.

I might pop out to Brixton Hill and go to Pizza Brixton, upholding the Dolce Vita in South London. So John's book, as a reminder to you all, is Delizia, the Epic History of Italians and Their Food. John, brilliant to have you back on the podcast. At some point, we'll definitely have you back to do the Mafia so that you really can block your copybook in Italy. Just to say, you know, anyone who's going to Italy, it's an absolutely wonderful book to take and read. thanks so much for coming on and thank you all for listening bye-bye ciao bye-bye goodbye i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment

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