by Dianne Hales
No publisher wanted this homespun cookbook. After a string of contemptuous rejections, Artusi dedicated his book to his two cats and published one thousand copies himself in 1891. It took four years to sell them. But despite this sluggish start, L’Artusi, as the book came to be known, became a literary phenomenon and a landmark in Italian culture. The inhabitants of every household, humble or highbrow, wanted their own L Artusi.
When I came across a copy on the bookshelves at L’Ercolana, Artusi won me over with his first sentence, “Cooking is una bricconcella—a troublesome sprite,” he observed. “Often it may drive you to despair. Yet when you do succeed, or overcome a great difficulty in doing so, you feel the satisfaction of a great triumph.”
A prodigious researcher, Artusi reclaimed dishes thought to be French, such as crêpes, which he traced to Tuscan crespelle, and bechamel sauce, a derivative of the ancient Roman colletta. The chicken Napoleon enjoyed after his victory at Marengo wasn’t prepared by his French cook, Artusi reported, but by a peasant woman in Piedmont using local ingredients.
Rather than borrowing French terms, Artusi committed himself to “our beautiful, harmonious language,” which, in the newly unified nation, meant the Tuscan tongue of Dante. He included a short guide to Tuscan words, such as cotoletta, or cutlet, and tritacarne, or mincer, that were not used throughout the peninsula. Translating from other dialects and using a light, engaging style, he also introduced regional recipes, such as piselli col prosciutto (peas with ham from Rome) and strichetti alla bolognese (noodles from “a young, charming Bolognese woman known as la Rondinella,” or “the little swallow”), that many Italians in other places had never tasted.
Describing pasticcio di maccheroni (a meat and macaroni casserole), Artusi joked that a pasticcio—meaning a hodgepodge, jumble, or mess—“always turns out well no matter how it is prepared.” The amateur gastronome created a pasticcio of his own, mixing culinary rules, advice, anecdotes, commentaries, and scientific trivia (such as which fish make sounds by expelling air)—all in an avuncular, encouraging tone. “Do not be alarmed if this dessert [strudel] looks like some ugly creature such as a giant leech or a shapeless snake after you cook it,” Artusi reassured readers. “You will like the way it tastes.”
Italians certainly liked the new tastes he introduced. For the fourteenth edition, bulging with 790 recipes—many contributed by readers—Artusi, who lived to age ninety-one, added a celebratory preface called “The Story of a Book That Is Like the Story of Cinderella,” the saga of a scorned manuscript that became a sensation, and laid the foundation for Italian cuisine as we know it.
“The ways of eating and speaking are always what unify a country,” Guido Tomassi, an Italian publisher specializing in cookbooks and food history, observes during a breakfast interview in Milan. Writing just a few decades after Italy’s unification, he explains, Artusi bolstered “Italians’ faith and pride in their cuisine, their new nation, and their new language.” The populist cookbook became one of the best-selling literary works of the time, second only to the fairy tale Pinocchio (whose name in Tuscan means “pine nut,” from the Latin pinus, “pine,” and the diminutive suffix occhio).
My friend Carla Nutti, who has prepared the most delicious meals I’ve ever eaten, recalls a well-worn L’Artusi in the kitchen of the azienda (combination ranch and farm, similar to the Spanish hacienda) in Emilia-Romagna where she grew up. When she and I met almost twenty years ago in Rome, I knew a smattering of Italian; Carla spoke—and still speaks—no English. So we combined Italy’s two culinary arts: she cooked mouthwatering renditions of such classics as Roman-style gnocchi and artichokes, tagliatelle in meat sauce, veal scaloppine, and Neapolitan pastries. And at her tavola imbandita (sumptuous table), always set with hand-embroidered linens and heirloom silver and china, I learned to eat like an Italian—not just with my mouth but with my eyes, nose, mind, memory, and, most important, soul.
On our last trip to Rome, Carla outdid herself with a cenone, a great holiday dinner (cena) that provided a culinary tour of Italy. The feast started with a tribute to Michelangelo—in the form of bruschettine con lardo di Colonnata.
“Lardo?” I asked, warily thinking of the thick white grease I vaguely remembered from childhood. No, Carla explained, Colonnata’s lardo (although 100 percent fat) is sliced from the subcutaneous layer of a pig’s abdomen—then salted, aromatized, spiced, and aged in marble for six to twelve months.
Melted over hot bread, this high-octane ingredient fueled the stone carvers of Carrara’s marble quarries. Michelangelo himself, as Carla put it, “deliziava il suo palato” (“delighted his palate”) with lardo di Colonnata whenever he visited the ever-chilly caverns to select stones. How could I not follow Il Divino’s lead? One bite produced a sensation not entirely remote from the flush I felt years ago at my first sight of his David.
For the first of our primi (first courses), risotto al radicchio di Chioggia, Carla chose Cannaroli rice, grown in the Po Valley in northern Italy. Until the 1960s, she told us, young girls called le mondine (from monda, for the process of cleaning the rice) came by the trainloads from all over Italy to plant and weed rice. The haunting melodies they sang during their backbreaking labor came to be known as the canti della risaia (songs of the rice fields). A famous neorealist film, Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice), made in 1949, showcased buxom, long-legged migrant workers in a poignant tale of una mondina and two small-time thieves who plot to steal rice from the storehouses during the celebration of the harvest’s end. To add just a bit of bitterness to our risotto, Carla chose a crisp radicchio from the Veneto that “si sposa bene con il riso ma anche con la pasta” (“marries itself well to rice as well as pasta”).
For the second primo, Carla presented a platter of jolly pale orange handmade pasta called cappellacci alla zucca, shaped like crumpled caps. Stuffed inside was a sweet but tangy mix of pumpkin, Parmigiano cheese, amaretti (almond biscotti), and mostarda di Mantova, which, unlike French mustard, combines the piquant spice with fruit and sugar. I couldn’t resist the temptation to fare la scarpetta (make the little shoe) and soak up the last of the sauce with a bit of bread.
I had just swallowed a morsel of the tenderest, most delicately flavored lamb I’d ever tasted when Carla told me that it was abbacchio, a suckling no more than a month or so old. I winced when I learned that the name comes from the Latin baculum, the cudgel used to kill lambs, a traditional symbol of innocence and sacrifice, served at Easter dinner. Until a few decades ago, shepherds would lead their flocks into Rome every spring so people could select victims for the annual slaughter. The word abbacchiato became slang for someone beaten down physically or mentally.
I can think of nothing more likely to restore such a poor soul’s low spirits than Carla’s signature dessert: homemade gelato in a circular mold, topped with zabaione. This sublime confection could be my downfall. For a dish (preferably two) I would hop on the next plane to Rome.
By the end of Carla’s feast, we had not only tasted some of Italy’s finest food and wine, but also, thanks to her gastronomic history lessons, ingested bits of its language, history, art, music, movies, and rituals. “To know a territory, you need to eat it,” the great Italian writer Italo Calvino once wrote. Keep this in mind the next time you twirl capellini around your fork, bite into a piping hot pizza, or savor a dish of steaming risotto. That’s not just food you’re eating. It’s Italy.
DURING A CONSULTATION AT A UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL in Italy, an earnest psychiatric resident, a young woman from Piedmont with long blond hair and amethyst eyes, presented my husband, Bob, with a diagnostic dilemma. Italian emergency rooms and clinics, she said, were seeing an increasing number of agitated young men, sometimes babbling or crying. Although they complained of being too restless to sleep and too distracted to work or study, medical tests found nothing physically wrong. What could be the culprit? My husband listed the usual suspects, such as drug abuse and the manic stage of bipolar disorder.
“In our experience
,” she commented in a husky low voice, “it is often love. Do you see many cases like this in the United States?” Bob and I exchanged quick glances, smiled, and shook our heads no.
Only in Italy can love’s colpo di fulmine (lightning bolt) set off spasimi (spasms) of infatuation of such Richter-scale force that they transform love-struck suitors into spasimanti, corteggiatori, innamorati, pretendenti, or, as if almost fatally stricken, casca-morti reduced to gazing sheepishly at a beloved. In English a heart breaks just like a dish, but a lovesick Italian soul claims a word of its own—spezzare—when it shatters into bits. It’s no wonder that the pop singer Tiziano Ferro croons of love making him so imbranato (slang for “clumsy” or “awkward”) that he’s like a “silly little dumpling.”
Love, as everyone suspects, truly is lovelier in Italy. “Anywhere else,” the nineteenth-century French writer known as Stendhal observed, “it is only a bad copy.” Bob and I have spent the most romantic times of our thirty-year marriage there. Yes, we’ve sipped vino and held hands at more candlelit tables than I can count. But Italians always conspire to make even cliched moments special. In Venice, I was pregnant when we glided through the canals, so the gondolier serenaded la bambina with some lullabies. At the faded grand hotels on Lake Maggiore and Lake Garda, the orchestra wouldn’t stop playing even though we were often the only couple still on the floor.
Once, when our mariner friends Ferruccio and Erasmo docked their boat in Capri on a summer evening, they instructed us to show up at the restaurant they’d chosen at precisely 9:35 p.m. When we arrived at the bustling eatery, they escorted us away from the crowded main dining room to a quiet alcove and insisted that Bob and I take the two chairs looking toward the faraglioni, the mammoth rock formations that heave out of the sea like relics of a primeval ruin. Within minutes a spectacular full luna rossa (red moon) ascended majestically into the sky, illuminating the towering rocks.
On vacation in 1990 we checked into the most romantic place I’d ever been, Il Pellicano, then a small country inn perched on flower-strewn terraces on a rocky hillside above the Tyrrhenian Sea. Its founders, Michael and Patsy Graham—a dashing British pilot and his glamorous American wife—chose this remote site to build a lovers’ hideaway because it reminded them of Pelican Point, California, where they had fallen in love. I said to Bob, “I want you to bring me here every year for the rest of our lives.” And he has. The hotel, which opened in 1965, has since developed into one of the most luxurious resorts in Italy. I’m angling for a plaque like the one we came across in a hotel in Ravenna commemorating Greta Garbo’s romantic interlude there. “I don’t believe you’re married,” Gianni, the maître d’, teases me every year. “You laugh too much. You must be lovers.” And of course, he says amanti, which sounds so much sexier.
Yet despite their romantic reputation, Italians reserve “ti amo” (“I love you”) only for the loves of their lives. English speakers love everyone and everything with the same profligate word—a lack of precision (and imagination) that confused my friend Francesca when she moved to America from Italy. “People were always telling me they loved my hair, my eyes, my spaghetti alla carbonara,” she explains. “How could it feel special when a man said he loved me?”
Italian parents, children, even lovers, express affection with “Ti voglio bene,” which translates literally into “I wish you well” but conveys much more: I wish the best for you, I want all good things for you. This phrase echoes in the lyrics of thousands of love songs. Smitten teenagers end their text messages with TVTB for “Ti voglio tanto bene” (“I love you so much”).
In his monumental Dizionario de’ sinonimi (Dictionary of Synonyms), published in 1830, the wordsmith Niccolò Tommaseo—described in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature as “very bright, proud, touchy, unrefined, unappealing, and oversexed”—dissected the linguistic nuances that differentiate affetto, affezione, amore, amorevolezza, benevolenza, inclinazione, passione, amicizia, amistanza, amistà, carità, tenerezza, cordialità, svisceratezza, ardore, and ardenza. L’amore, he asserted, stands out as a more active, powerful, stirring sentiment that cannot be described with any other name and that can take on both “nobility and depravity.”
The latter may have held particular significance for Tommaseo, a religious man who struggled mightily with his uncontrollable libido. In a personal journal, he recorded his daily fights with temptations of the flesh, along with such details as how many mouthfuls of food he ate every day—from fifty to sixty-seven—and how frequently he washed behind his ears and had his toenails cut. This obsessive poet and novelist just as meticulously charted the shades of difference among voglia (wish), the first degree of desire; desiderio, born of true love; brama, a still-stronger craving; and unbridled appetito, “il primo moto d’amore, e l’ultime furie” (“the first motion of love, and its final furies”).
As Tommaseo definitively showed, Italian qualifies hands down as the language of love. But why does almost all classic Italian music and writing seem to be about love? When I ask this question of Luciano Chessa, a composer and Petrarchian scholar, his mouth, framed by a thick mustache and beard, breakes into a smile as he responds, “What else is there?” I cannot imagine a citizen of any other nation—certainly no buttoned-down Brit or ambitious American, not even a flirtatious French man or seductive Spaniard—making this statement.
How is it that love, or maybe just the love of love, has embedded itself so deeply in the Italian psyche?
“Solo chi ama conosce.” “Only those who love understand,” says an Italian proverb. And so I went looking for the answer in Italian love stories.
The Roman Empire itself began with a tale of love—or, more accurately, lust—almost three millennia ago. The libidinous god Mars, smitten by the beauty of a vestal virgin, snuck into her temple in the town of Alba Longa to sleep with her. When the disgraced vestal gave birth to twin boys, remarkable for their size and beauty, the evil tribal king ordered the infants thrown in the Tiber. The cradle containing the babies drifted downstream and washed ashore at the base of the Palatine Hill.
According to legend, a lupa (she-wolf) suckled the twins Romulus and Remus. However, their nursemaid may well have been human. Lupa was slang for “prostitute,” and brothels were called lupanaria. In 2007, in an astonishing discovery, archaelogists unearthed the luparcalea, the sacred cave, decorated with sea shells and colored marble mosaics, that sheltered the twins and served as a shrine for their worship.
For centuries in this cave, on every February 15, Romans would celebrate a fertility festival called the Lupercalia with the sacrifice of a goat. Priests sliced the goat’s hide into strips and dipped them in the sacrificial blood. Boys would run through the streets, gently slapping women with the goatskin strips to enhance their fertility in the coming year. Later in the day, all the young unmarried women in the city would place their names in a large urn. Rome’s bachelors each selected a name and became that woman’s sexual partner for the year in a sort of trial union that often led to marriage.
As it grew in power, the church abolished this pagan practice but created in its stead the most romantic of saints’ days on February 14 to honor a martyred Roman priest named Valentine. Although historical accounts differ, Valentine seems to have served in Rome in the third century A.D., when Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men because he believed that bachelors made better soldiers. Valentine, sympathetic to young lovers, defied the decree and continued to perform weddings.
Arrested and tortured, the tenderhearted saint developed a friendship with a young girl—perhaps his jailer’s daughter—who came to visit him. Some say they fell in love; others claim that he cured her blindness. Before being beheaded, the saint sent her a note that he signed, “From your Valentine.” Lovers around the world have been using the same phrase ever since on the holiday Italians call il giorno della festa degli innamorati (the day of the feast of the enamored).
Are these mythic stories true? On Palatine Hill, an oas
is of shade and birdsong that I like to visit late in the afternoon after the crowds trudge down into the forum, they feel true. This is the oldest part of Rome, named for Pales, goddess of shepherds, and steeped in lore and legends. For centuries emperors and nobles built their houses on this holy site. Visitors to these grand mansions called them palazzi—the root of the French palais, the Spanish palla, and the English palace. The Palatine’s literary residents left an even grander linquistic legacy: some of the loveliest—and lustiest—love poetry ever written.
Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84–c. 54 B.C.) transformed romantic poetry, a Greek invention, by depicting love as a way of life rather than a flicker of lust or fit of madness. He wrote the first extended body of verse describing every phase of a love affair, from the initial quiver of excitement to luxuriant fulfillment to disillusioned bitterness. His inspiration was a beautiful noble, older married woman he called Lesbia (a tribute to the Greek poet Sappho’s island of love), who was later accused of poisoning her husband and sleeping with her brother (a not atypical scenario in ancient Rome). One poem begins with a line that could have been the motto of its citizens—“gaudenti” (pleasure lovers), as a friend describes them: “Let’s live, my Lesbia, let’s live and love!”
Utterly besotted, Catullus begged for “a thousand kisses, then a hundred more … give me billions and billions of the damn things!” Lost for centuries, a manuscript of more than a hundred of Catullus’s poems was found about 1300—stopping up the hole of a wine barrel in his hometown of Verona. His poetic followers served as inspiration for the French troubadours and the Tuscan poets who created the “sweet new style” of writing that Dante popularized.