Italian cuisine

• 1. Introduction

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  Italian cuisine traces its earliest recorded roots to a Greek Sicilian named Archestratus of Syracuse, who in the 4th century BC wrote a poem insisting on "top quality and seasonal" ingredients and simple preparation of fish. More than two thousand years later, in 2025, UNESCO listed Italian cuisine as intangible cultural heritage. That span of time, from a single poem about fresh fish to one of the most formally protected food traditions on earth, raises a set of questions worth sitting with. How did simplicity become the defining principle of a cuisine that spans twenty distinct regions? What forces, from Arab traders to New World voyagers to Piedmontese food reformers, bent and reshaped Italian cooking without erasing its core? And what does it mean that two out of three Italian agri-food products sold worldwide are not actually made in Italy? These are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Simplicity Doctrine

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  Archestratus of Syracuse argued that flavours should not be masked by spices, herbs, or other seasonings. His insistence on simple preparation was not just a personal preference; it became a recurring theme that Italian cooking would return to across centuries, even as it was repeatedly abandoned and then recovered.

  By the 1st century AD the Roman Empire had moved in the opposite direction. De re coquinaria, the cookbook compiled in that period, contained 470 recipes calling for heavy use of spices and herbs. The Romans employed Greek bakers to produce breads and imported cheeses from Sicily, treating the island's cheesemakers as the finest in the known world. They reared goats, grew artichokes and leeks, and imported cherries, apricots, and peaches.

  In the 15th century, the chef Maestro Martino articulated a return to restraint. Writing for the Patriarch of Aquileia at the Vatican, he noted the avoidance of excessive spices in favour of fresh herbs. His Libro de arte coquinaria contained a recipe for maccaroni siciliani, made by wrapping dough around a thin iron rod to dry in the sun, cooked in capon stock flavoured with saffron. The technique was precise; the flavours were carefully layered, not buried.

  This tension between elaboration and restraint would run through every era of Italian culinary writing. When Giacomo Castelvetro, originally from Modena, moved to England in the early 17th century because he was a Protestant, he wrote a book listing Italian vegetables and fruits along with their preparation. He favoured simmering vegetables in salted water and serving them with olive oil, salt, fresh ground pepper, lemon juice, or orange juice. He featured vegetables as a central part of the meal, not mere accompaniments. Castelvetro's book was structured by season: hop shoots in the spring, truffles in the winter. Simplicity, for him, was a seasonal discipline.

• 3. What the Arabs Brought

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  Arabs conquered Sicily in the 9th century and the culinary consequences were lasting. Spinach, almonds, and rice arrived with them. So did citrus fruits, artichokes, chickpeas, pistachios, sugarcane, aubergines, and durum wheat, which became the raw material for pasta.

  Durum wheat matters because Italian law still mandates its use. Dry pasta (pasta secca) in Italy can only be made from durum wheat flour or durum wheat semolina. Durum flour and durum semolina carry a yellow tinge in colour. The legal requirement is a direct descendant of the grain the Arabs introduced more than a thousand years ago.

  A Norman king surveying Sicily in the 12th century observed people making long strings from flour and water called atriya, which eventually became trii, a term still used for spaghetti in southern Italy. The Normans themselves added to the larder: the casserole, salted cod (baccalà), and stockfish all entered the Italian pantry through Norman contact and remain popular today.

  Sicily's layered heritage is visible in the modern kitchen. In Trapani, in the extreme western corner of the island, North African influences show clearly in the use of couscous-based dishes, usually combined with fish. Mint is used extensively in Sicilian cooking in a way that differs from the rest of Italy. Cassata and arancini, two of the island's most recognised dishes, embody a history of Greek, Spanish, Jewish, Maghrebi, and Arab cultural presence stretching across two millennia. The Sicilian cook Mithaecus, born in the 5th century BC, is credited with bringing knowledge of Sicilian gastronomy to Greece; his cookbook was the first in Greek, making him the earliest cookbook author in any language whose name is known.

• 4. The New World Reboot

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  Bartolomeo Scappi, personal chef to Pope Pius V, published his Opera in 1570 in five volumes containing over 1,000 recipes. The final volume includes a recipe for a sweet Neapolitan pizza. It is not the savoury version known today because tomatoes had not yet arrived in Italy. The Opera does include corn and turkey from the New World, but the tomato, which would become inseparable from Italian cooking, was still absent.

  When the tomato finally arrived through the Columbian exchange, a Neapolitan named Vincenzo Corrado was among its first champions. His 1773 book Il cuoco galante gave the tomato a central role with 13 recipes. His zuppa al pomodoro is described as similar to today's Tuscan pappa al pomodoro. His 1798 edition then introduced a "Treatise on the Potato" following French promoter Antoine-Augustin Parmentier's successful work on the tuber. In 1790, Francesco Leonardi sketched a history of Italian cuisine from the Roman Age and gave the first recipe for a tomato-based sauce.

  The tomato's rise was so complete that it is now difficult to imagine Italian cooking without it. Pasta dishes with tomato are common throughout Italy. Campania's volcanic soil gives particular character to its tomatoes, peppers, and artichokes. In Abruzzo, spaghetti alla puttanesca is built on olives, tomatoes, anchovies, capers, chili peppers, and garlic. The ingredient that arrived from the Americas a few hundred years ago now anchors the cuisine's identity worldwide. Beans, pumpkins, courgette, and peppers made the same journey from the Americas and are now equally embedded in regional cooking.

• 5. The Book That Unified a Cuisine

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  La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare bene, written by Pellegrino Artusi and first published in 1891, is widely regarded as the canon of classic modern Italian cuisine and is still in print. Artusi's recipes predominantly originate from Romagna and Tuscany, where he lived. The timing matters: around 1880, two decades after Italy's political unification, the Italian diaspora had begun, and with it came the spread of Italian cuisine beyond its borders.

  Artusi wrote at a moment when Italian identity was being assembled from very different regional parts. For centuries, the country had not existed as a unified political entity; regional identities in food preceded national ones. Milan's risottos, Bologna's tortellini, Naples' pizza, and Trieste's multicultural table were all distinct before they were all Italian.

  At the beginning of the 18th century, Italian culinary books had already begun emphasising the regionalism of Italian cuisine rather than taking cues from French cuisine. These books were no longer addressed to professional chefs but to bourgeois housewives. Periodicals in booklet form such as La cuoca cremonese in 1794 gave sequences of ingredients according to season. In 1779, Antonio Nebbia from Macerata wrote Il cuoco maceratese, addressing the importance of local vegetables and pasta, rice, and gnocchi. He preferred vegetables and chicken over heavier meats for stock.

  Artusi's book synthesised and elevated this regional tradition into a national one. The first recipe for pesto appeared in La cucina genovese by Gian Battista and Giovanni Ratto in 1871, the same decade as unification. Ippolito Cavalcanti's La cucina teorico-pratica described the first recipe for pasta with tomatoes. These books arrived in quick succession because the question of what Italian food was had become a question worth answering.

• 6. Protection, Fraud, and Italian Sounding

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  Italy holds a large number of traditional specialities protected under EU law. The country has more than 490 cheeses and dairy products marked as PDO (protected designation of origin), PGI (protected geographical indication), and PAT (prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali). In the wine sector, specific legal protections exist under the denominazione di origine controllata (DOC) and the denominazione di origine controllata e garantita (DOCG). Balsamic vinegar, for instance, is made only in the Emilian cities of Modena and Reggio Emilia under legally binding traditional procedures.

  These protections exist because the problem they address is large. Two out of three Italian agri-food products sold worldwide are not made in Italy. The phenomenon known as Italian Sounding involves using Italian words, images, colour combinations evoking the Italian flag, geographical references, and brands to promote food products that have nothing to do with Italian cuisine. Italian Sounding covers almost every sector of Italian food, from cheeses to cured meats, pasta, regional bread, extra virgin olive oils, and wines. It is estimated to generate 55 billion euros worldwide annually.

  Counterfeit products that violate registered trademarks are legally punishable. Italian Sounding itself sits in a different category: it cannot be classified as illegal from a strictly legal standpoint, but it still represents, in the words used in the source, "a huge damage to the Italian economy and to the potential resources of Made in Italy."

  The Italian Sounding problem has a structural driver. Italy is the world's largest producer of wine and the country with the widest variety of indigenous grapevine varieties in the world. It is also the largest consumer of olive oil, at 30% of the world total, and the second largest producer and exporter, producing more than 464,000 tons. Italian cuisine generated an estimated 251 billion euros in global foodservice revenue in 2024. The scale of global appetite for Italian food vastly exceeds what Italy can supply, creating the conditions for imitation.

• 7. Slow Food and the Counter-Movement

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  In 1986, following the spread of fast food imported from Anglo-Saxon countries and in particular from the United States, the Slow Food cultural and gastronomic movement was founded in Bra, Piedmont. It was later converted into an institution with the aim of protecting culinary specificities and safeguarding regional products of Italian cuisine under the Slow Food Presidia.

  Slow Food speaks out against overproduction and food waste. It sees globalisation as a process in which small and local farmers and food producers should be simultaneously protected from and included in the global food system. The movement focuses on food quality rather than quantity.

  Piedmont is a notable location for this founding. It is the Italian region with the largest number of cheeses with protected geographical status and wines under DOC. It is home to the University of Gastronomic Sciences, described as the most prestigious school of Italian cooking. Nutella, gianduiotto, and marron glacé, all globally recognised products, originate from Piedmont's pastry and chocolate tradition.

  The Italian chef Gualtiero Marchesi, who lived from 1930 to 2017, is considered the founder of Italian nouvelle cuisine. His approach is defined as "a cuisine of the head rather than the throat," characterised by lighter, more delicate dishes, an increased emphasis on presentation, and the separation of flavours, without upending the ancient Italian culinary tradition. Nouvelle cuisine was designed for the most expensive restaurants; Slow Food was designed for the village festival and the family farm. Both emerged, in different decades, as responses to the same anxiety: that something essential about Italian food was being lost or diluted. Italy is home to 395 Michelin star-rated restaurants, suggesting that the high end of the formal dining world has also taken root alongside these other currents.