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Do you want to know what a pizza is? It is a focaccia made from elevened bread dough, which is a toast in the oven. On top of it, they put a sauce with a little bit of everything when its hollas are combined. The black of the toast bread, the sickly white of the garlic, an anchovie, the in the yellow of the oil and the Friday 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. That, of course, This was Halo Holodi, the author of The adventures of Pinocchio. 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, we'll have picked up from my dropping of the hard sea. Did you notice that, Dominic?

I did because Hlolydi 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 stupified, wouldn't he?

He'd be appalled.

Do you think he'd be appalled?

A patchwork of greasy filth. I think his position is quite clear, isn't it?

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 heist story 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 claims of shame, apart from being a top historian of Italy, is the only person who's listened to all 11 episodes of the series about Custer and the Sioux.

Or as they were say in Tuscany, Huster. Huster.

I loved it. The deep dive, the hour-by-hour narrative was excellent.

This is very good. You can definitely come again. I mean, your book is the epic history of Italians and their food. 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, 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 cuisines. 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 Normands in the 11th century. And that makes its cuisine have a different shape to the cuisine of 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 dialog between cities, really. Italian food is city food. That's my argument.

Because I think the general sense, which is definitely one fostered by adverts, is the idea that Italian food comes from the country, and it's the mama with her traditional recipes, and it's these recipes that have now been picked up by people in cities and 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 nonsense.

But there's really no evidence for it.

You know this Italian peasants playing football in the Olive Grove version of Italian history? You may remember that ad. All the documentation we have tells us that Italian peasants ate incredibly badly throughout history. When Italy was unified in 1861, one of the first things they tried to do was find out more about the peasantry and so on. It's an avalanche of documentation over the next 60, 70 years. 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 4 centimeters 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 Ireland. So what the classical world has bequeathed to, contemporarily, is what they call the 100 cities of Italy, these local centers with a very strong sense of entity. There are so many Italian dishes that carry the names of cities. Pizza la napoletana, Bistica la fiorentina, risotto, la 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 urban branding as they were exchanged with other cities. That's where Italian food history happens. That's where the the documents are and the stories and so on and so forth.

Let's start with the first city you talk about, which actually is perhaps an unexpected city, which is Palermo, the capital of Sicily. You kick off in 1154 in the reign of Roger II, the Norman, Arab, byzantine fusion of Sicily. 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. 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, it just means dough or paste. It only really comes to mean what we mean by pasta relatively recently. 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. 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 Durham wheat. The first document that testifies to the arrival of that on Italian soil dates from Roger II's reign in Palermo in 1154. It comes from a geographer, Ali Drizzi was his name. He was an Arabic-speaking geographer, part of this extraordinary the fusion court of Roger II, with Greeks, Jews, and Arabs, and Normands moving together to run this kingdom. He was one of the intellectual stars of this court, and he was commissioned to produce a planosphere, a great silver domed map of the known world as a advert for Roger's power. A book to go with it, which describes everything from the desert islands of Scotland in the north to this sandblasted unknown of Africa.

When he gets close to the Palermo capital, he starts, obviously, to get into more detail. He goes to a place called Trabilla, which is just along the Coast from Palermo, which is a center famous for its springs and river courses. There he says that there is, and he uses the term factory, my Arabic is non It's not an existing, but it's definitely a center of large scale production for export. Producing this stuff, he calls itria, and that is still used as an Italian word for a particular type of pasta called triye. It is short bits of dried Durham wheat spaghetti, which, according to this geographer, Ali Driesi, is made in huge amounts and exported all over the place, particularly all up and down the Coast of Italy from Genua 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, 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 Sicily, then that can't be the case.

Marco Polo is 150 years later, and we've already got pasta here. Marco Polo doesn't mention pasta or noodles. And actually interesting, although Marco Polo didn't introduce spaghetti to Italy, he did help introduce it to the United States because that story was actually invented for the first time by the Pasta Manufacturer's Association of the United States in their industry magazine in 1929. This story, which then, for some of for a mysterious reason, took off and got made into a movie in the '30s, and so with this pasta anecdote. I think the reason there is they really wanted to make pasta less Italian, so less greasy and Mediterranean and foreign, and to make 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 book, so 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 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 But it wasn't 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 15th century. Sicilians are known by other Italians as mangia maccheroni, macaroni eaters. Maccheroni is the most widespread term for pasta, this dry pasta in this period. Then it makes a very important transition we can talk about later to Naples. Naples is really where it becomes hugely popular and emblematic. I mean, you find it even in medieval cookbooks in Britain. So it is traveling. And by the Renaissance's 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. Don't be like Jamie Oliver and put Teresa on a paella, that thing. You got to get back to the original Bolognazi recipe or pesto or whatever. And you point out what to this all is. So if you'd gone back to Venice for the original Venetian food, it's not liver and onions, but it's more like Indian food, right? Heavily spiced? Be like having a biriani 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. It's where Europe gets its spices. It's why Venice came so rich. And they love their spices, partly because of taste, partly because it's got good snob value, it's food bling. But they also love it for health reasons, for Galenic health reasons, this idea of balancing the humans. Right up to the 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.

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. You quote him on bear meat, that it isn't good for the spleen or liver but can prevent hair loss. That's maybe something for Dominic to bear in mind. Yeah, thank you. Also, he's very, very into aphrodisiac foods, isn't he? 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 libidenus 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 interesting character. I mean, this is the pattern of my whole book. All too often, food historians who essentially cooks, trying to be historians, want to break into these sources and burgle them for recipes that look something like what we eat today. When actually, if you spend your time looking at sources and putting them in context, you 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 Platina, who was a humanist. Humanists were these scholars of the classical world who invented the Renaissance as a narrative. Here it is. 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 illusions, while also saying, well, actually, you know what? We can also do better than that. In the classical world, they didn't have Blamonge, for example. We love our Blamonge. Which is not the blanc mange that we know today. Blanc mange is Bianco Mangiari, which is pounded capon and almons 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 used the classical world as a launch pan, taking off into a new era of fame and greatness. Platina was also a member of this obsessive secret academy of like-minded humanist scholars who got up to all kinds of things, having to toga parties and all that stuff.

Sounds great fun.

Sounds like an absolute hoot. Although the book is full of gibes against his mates, it sounds like they weren't actually all that friendly. There was quite a lot of rivalry going on.

That's just academics, though, isn't it?

Yes, exactly like that. He subsequently got arrested for plotting to kill the Pope. 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 has 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 Bocaccio and people like that. That's happening with food as well. Remember, this is the European system of courts where this elite cuisine is being created that's quite international. Italy is one of the engines of this. Of course, Rome, very important as well because it's the international center of the papacy. In the Renaissance, the capital of Italian food as a result.

You're talking about all the courts. Can we just go in what I think is the best banquet in the book, which is in Ferrara in 1529. It's thrown by Duke Alfonso I for his son, E coli, who's marrying the daughter of Louis XII, France. And it's so long, the list, that we can only give a hint of the horrors. So 25 plates of boned cape on coat and blancs, fried then covered with sugar. 25 large white sausages with 104 fried sweet breads sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, 50 pieces of salted pipe in yellow imperial sauce, fried pigeons with slices of citton, 250 cent pigeons in puff pastry. Here's the thing I'd never eat, 125 portions of ale in marzipan. So obviously this is bonkers to us because it's the mixture of sweet and savor that we associate with, 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, it's a very ancient notion, the idea that some areas produce better produce of a particular kind. Talking about eels, in the Po Delta is where those eels tend to come from.

When a Duke is serving eels, is he making a 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. Monks have always wanted to do that. I talk briefly about that mosaic from Theodoric's Ravenna, where Theoderic boasts about his ability to bring all four seasons to the table at once. That is the dream. That It's the heart of the whole food bling, the magnificence, to use the word of the day, of renaissance, quarterly 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. The idea of there are days when you're not allowed to eat meat, it's more wholly. It begins with monasticism in the early centuries of Christianity. And that becomes this obsessive argument about it. How can we get round 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 throughout 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.

Marzipan, though, really? I mean, that's the single worst dish I think I've ever heard of. I 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 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 rise to a greater supremacy, that Italian food as well as culture is seen as going slightly into abeyance. 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 play thing of the great powers and court culture such as fashions are driven further north, particularly Paris. It's from Paris that food fashions are revolutionized and changed. Really, we wouldn't have modern Italian cuisine without the influence of France. There's no question about it. Then, of course, you also get the new world foods arriving. The shift on the central 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. Italians 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, in Southern Italy, a lot of it ruled by Spain. There's a whole food revolution going on in which Italy is a relatively marginal player.

John, let's take a break at 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 recognize. 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 the Broccoli eaters, but now they're rebranded Mac many 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.

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This is a tradition that really happens in the 17th and 18th century. Remember, beforehand it was Sicilians, because this is where Jérôme wheat was grown in Sicily and so on, who were known as Mangem Manger Macheroni, macaroni eaters. But that nickname switches to the Neapolitans who stopped 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 Manger Macheroni 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. 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. It can be made easily in places like Graniano and so on just down the Coast. But it has a hugely important cultural and symbolic meaning in this period as well. Like you say, it's associated with the Lazzaroni. This is the era of the Grand Tour. Everybody who goes to Naples has to have a theory about who these Lazzaroni are.

Because these are guys who loaf around in rags, in the sun. This is where the idea of the dolce fargiente comes from. This is a langerous existence of happy poverty that these guys are supposed to embody. 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.

The king himself does that, doesn't he?

The king himself does that. He even does it at the King Ferdinand, who was in power for an awful long time between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Lazzaroni were basically a proletarian elite, loyal to the monarchy, who exercised a protection racket over the political system. They were the monarchs' representatives among the rabble. This macaroni came to symbolize this bond between the monarch and the masses who the Lazzaroni were chiefs of. 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 at until quite a lot later.

So the pork fat, we don't associate that at all with Naples. That's 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 mediterránea, 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 be invented by Americans?

From the late 19th, early 20th century, something crazy, like seven and a half million Italians immigrate 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, Anselm Keyes 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. In order to monetize his academic research, which is something, of course, I 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 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 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 focaccia. The word probably related to the Greek word for pita and the Turkish word pedae. That's where it comes from, I'm guessing.

We're guessing, yeah. The thing is flat breads. People putting disks of dough onto hot stones. That's so ancient that what's specific about it 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. Alexander 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 flavoring. It's very, very much associated with the low city of Naples, the poorest, most overcrowded quarters of the city. 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? 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. Naples, because of its hygienic conditions, it's overcrowding, it's poverty, and so on, so on, is particularly vulnerable to it. I think there are something like eight outbreaks in the 19th century. That's why nobody would dream of eating pizza. We began with the quote from Carlo Colodi, 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. 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. The king of the day, King Umberto, with his wife, Margarita, went to the city. Actually, Umberto first, Margarita went a couple of days later when they were rebuilding the city. To build on their popularity, Naples has always had a monarchical feeling about it. That continued for a long time. And part of Margarita's image, she was a highly fashionable... There was even a fashion magazine named after in the period. She was a real lifestyle leader.

And it seems that pizza required its name, Pizza Margarita, that is, around that time as a 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, Raffaele Esposito, who runs a bakery in the Spanish Quarter, and he makes three pizzas, one with white bait, 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 a many, many. I mean, writing Italian food history is really like machine gunning anchovies in a tin. 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 supposed to be the 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? This is not an embargo against you or something like this, stamping on all these.

You've got the matons getting you. Now you've got the Italian foodies. Yeah, I know.

Those who've read the book, you'll know it's got a higher body count than my history with the Mafia. This book, Dillitou, got made into a TV series in Italy, a six-part series, me presenting in it. It seemed to go down very, very well. I don't know why, but it It's 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.

Irony is piled on irony?

Yeah, absolutely.

Can I just ask you about the attitude of the fascists, the original fascists, Mussolini, to food, because he's actually not particularly interested in it at all.

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. Mussolini, he had a gastroduodenal ulcer, which tortured him for most of his political life. 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 this idea of self-sufficiency urgency 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 pasta is it would be pretty much It's possible to have an Italian pasta culture on the scale without importing grain from places like the Crimea. 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 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 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. They put on a big show in Rome and set up this rustic village, so-called in the Circus Maximus in Rome, as part of an exhibition of fascid 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 postwar period, the economic miracle. Italy goes very, very rapidly from being a peasant society to being an industrial society, late '50s, '60s, '70s. 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 thing, the state feels corrupt, and also of environmental crises of various kinds. It's in this period in the 1970s that you start to get rustic food nostalgia. 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 Mulino Bianco, the White Mill.

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 pronounce that correctly. 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 that little pass, almost like Dumpling, 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.

Yeah. I mean, this is what people miss out completely with this rustic tradition's 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, medieval people loved a pie that you cook by boiling mini pie. So they're very ancient. And there are recipes right back into those medieval cookbooks we talked about earlier. By the post-war period, period prosperity, this 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. Then they get pushed into education and into the labor market again. People can't make those things anymore, whether they don't have the skills, or they certainly don't have the time. 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. You've got to have trust. 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 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 Giovannirana.

So, John, can we just end? As you said, you've been shooting anchovies in a tin here. I've seen 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 a position when people do have the resources then to rediscover and exploit these traditions, all kinds of advertising, flummery about peasant traditions. And the slow food case is that language, 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 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. It was only a generation ago. The Italians start to capitalize that in a commercial way with the 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 are the outliers. I was thinking about what makes Italy different. And I guess you I would argue what makes Italy different is that it always had that network of cities, and 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, bequeathed the 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 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. 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 to eat 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 on the podcast. At some point, we'll definitely have you back to do the Mafia so that you really can plot your copy book in Italy.

Just to say, anyone who's going to Italy, it's an absolutely wonderful book to take and read. So thanks so much for coming on. And thank you all for listening. Bye-bye. Ciao.

Bye-bye. Goodbye.

So here's the from our Vietnam series.

I had expected that when it started, Americans being Americans were to be filled with hubris. Nobody's going to be able to stop our military firepower from succeeding. How are these pyjama-clad guerillas possibly going to stop us.

I had expected confidence on the part of US commanders. Some of them had it, but certainly most of the civilians, Johnson himself, Robert McNamera, who's the Secretary of Defense, George Bundy, National Security Advisor, the top leadership in Congress.

There is a gloomy realism here about what lies ahead.

And even now, think about this, even now, Lyndon Johnson tells his wife, Lady Bird, I'm trapped on Vietnam.

Whichever way I go, I'm going to lose.

He understands right at the beginning that this is going to be his downfall, and this is 1965.

To hear the full series, just search Empire, wherever you get your podcast.