Italy boasts a thousand-year-old gastronomical tradition enriched by the contribution and the expertise of all the populations which ruled over Italian territories before and after the fall of the Roman Empire: from the Arabs in Sicily to the Spaniards in Naples, from the Longobards coming from the North to the Saracens, who landed on western shores of the peninsula. The corpus of gastronomical culture we can call Italian cuisine today is a result of the cultural integration of these populations with the culinary habits derived from the local traditions of single regions.

We must not forget that today’s Italy is the result of the unification of the many small states it was divided into over the past centuries, which in turn were divided into regions with different dialects and cultural traditions. In 1861 when the Italian kingdom was officially instituted, out of a population of twenty-five million inhabitants, no more than six hundred thousand citizens could speak the national language; everybody else spoke regional dialects. The same is true for eating habits. Pasta, which was introduced by the Arabs in Sicily in the 10th century, was the staple food all over the South, whereas people from the North preferred polenta (cornmeal mush) and rice, which, although introduced in Europe by the Arabs, was actually brought to Italy by the Spaniards. There was already a kind of “noble” cuisine, which had developed inside the palaces of the Renaissance aristocracy and had almost disappeared as a consequence of the fall of such classes.

Rural traditions, which were centered around the consumption of local agricultural products, obviously bounced into the city culture. The restaurant industry was two-sided: on the one hand the famous grand hotels boasting French chefs or Italian chefs trained in France, on the other hand the family-managed restaurants, which were often little more than dignified country inns where the innkeepers’ wives prepared the same dishes they would make for their families.

The first book listing a systematic collection of Italian recipes was La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene, in which the author Pellegrino Artusi had gathered all the typical dishes of the average Italian household. Only around the second half of the 20th century, when the ancient Renaissance texts (those of Platina, Bartolomeo Scappi, Bartolomeo Stefani, and Cristoforo di Messisburgo, il Cuoco Galante of Vincenzo Corrado) were rediscovered, did the great Italian cuisine of the past centuries really come back to life again.

Still, the most radical changes occurred after the Sixties. The development of transportation made it possible for fresh fish to be delivered to inland cities rather than being available only at seaside towns. This resulted in the amazing spread of excellent fish restaurants in the main cities. All this happened alongside with the consumers' growing demand for lighter eating, using olive oil instead of butter, lard or other animal fats. Cooking times have remarkably shortened and, generally speaking, Italian cooking has become more and more oriented toward respecting typical foods’ original flavors and smells, thus topping them less and less with the heavy sauces used in the past.

This excerpt is from Tony May’s ITALIAN CUISINE. Click here to inquire about purchasing a copy of this title. The above brief history of Italian cuisine was written for inclusion in Mr. May’s by Giorgio Mistretta, Journalist and Food Historian.