Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa
Matthew Fort
320pp, Fourth Estate, £16.99
Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy
Carol Helstosky 288pp, Berg, £18.99
We know very little about Italian food, as Matthew Fort's entertaining study shows. What has come through to us has been beautified, pared down and made into either fast food or very expensive and posh "slow food". Fort's hilarious gastronomic journey around Italy shows not just the variety of Italian food, but its deep connection with local and regional traditions. The survival, under pressure, of this incredibly rich and complicated series of diets - there is no such thing as Italian food, just as there is no such thing as Italy - is one of the wonders of the modern world.
There are many refreshing things about Eating Up Italy. One is the studied avoidance of everything that is cliched about Italy's image abroad. On Fort's map of his travels, there is a huge gap in the centre-west of Italy. He doesn't go anywhere near Florence. No Tuscany, no Umbria, no Liguria, no Rome - the four places most visited by the English. Light years from Under the Tuscan Sun, Fort's vision is much more In the Calabrian Driving Rain. Another refreshing feature is the de-romanticisation of the country. Large parts of Italy are ugly, badly developed, covered with half-built illegal housing or hideous advertising signs.
And you can eat badly, very badly. In one hotel in Calabria the food consisted, in part, of "a huge round of something unidentifiable, which reminded me of the watery, claggy scrambled egg we had at school". Later, after a series of fantastic hits, he has another miss, near Mantua. "I proceeded to eat one of the nastiest meals I had had in a long time ... [including] a chicken leg of Frankensteinian proportions swimming in grease, which managed to be both tasteless and dry, in spite of the grease." What was different about these experiences, however, was that they were the exception and very much not the rule.
One of the nicest traditions in Italian cuisine is the tendency to offer customers the freshest food available. Restaurants often simply do not have menus. They will bring you what they have, perhaps giving you a choice between two or three dishes. In one restaurant, again in Calabria, this conversation took place between the writer and a waiter.
"Antipastacarneopesce?" said the young man briskly.
"Eh?" I said.
"Antipastacarneopesce?" he repeated.
"Oh, si." I said.
"Carne o pesce?" he said with a touch of asperity.
"Oh, carne. Definitely carne," I said.
"Vino?"
"Si, si."
He whisked away.
Fort is then assailed by no less than four pasta courses plus pudding. "I didn't exactly leap into the saddle after that."
Saddle? Was Fort making his journey on a horse? His choice was far more Italian. He made the journey by Vespa; the first part on a 50cc model, which chugged along nicely through the south, the second on a sleek 125cc which drew a series of admiring comments. Riding slowly, and stopping frequently for naps in orchards, Fort guides us up Italy. On his way, he explains the origins and contexts of the food he eats, while never overdoing the history, politics or sociology. It is elegantly woven together, supported by mouth-watering recipes. This is not a conventional guide book (we are not meant to revisit the restaurants or even places Fort goes to) but it is an invitation to see and taste Italy in a different light.
The book is also very funny. My favourite episode is what Fort calls "the most hallucinatory and terrifying period of my life" - a scooter trip inside Naples. "Traffic roared, leaped, hooted, tooted, peeled away, converged, moved in all directions at once with terrible intensity ... the traffic lights were for decoration ... to be gone through, whatever their colour, pushed through, shimmied through, got through by guile or brute force." Fort is unimpressed with Naples's gastronomic symbol - the pizza - preferring "lunch in a tiny trattoria ... so ramshackle, it looked as if it were about to fall down".
He looks to understand the various regional specialisations, talking to a pepperoni expert and the founder of the country's "slow food" movement, among others. All this is complemented by an excellent series of black-and-white photographs. What emerges is a mosaic of regional and inter-regional diets under threat, but surviving and even renewing themselves, in a globalised world where the rural way of life will soon be something of the distant past.
Some of the deeper answers to questions concerning the relationship between diet, Italians, food and the state might have been developed in Carol Helstosky's Garlic and Oil. Unfortunately, the book does not live up to its billing as "the first comprehensive history of food habits in modern Italy". There is very little here on the 1950s, when most Italians - for the first time -could afford to consume items that were not necessary for survival, and the focus of the book is fascism (20 years out of Italy's 144). Helstosky seems confused about what kind of diet Italy has, or has had. She ignores the incredible variety of cuisine, born from a combination of geographical features (mountains, lakes, hills, rice fields) and cultural exchange - the influence of successive waves of invasion, immigration and domination. She even makes the extraordinary claim that "a rocky terrain covers much of the peninsula", more or less ignoring the Po Valley - the country's economic and agricultural powerhouse.
Although the book is packed with fascinating insights - the role of Italian emigrants, the attempts by fascism to impose dietary norms - not enough is tested in the real world of family life. Too many general statistics are produced and very little is given about actual cooking and eating habits. The world of the sharecropper, which dominated large parts of central Italy right up to the 1950s, is ignored. Fascism tried to shape national eating habits; whether it succeeded is another matter, and the mosaic of food production and consumption which survives suggests it did not. Helstosky's claim that "in the decades after 1945, Italian consumers struggled to define and preserve the traditions and food considered characteristically Italian" is followed on the same page by "throughout the 1950s, however, Italians turned to food as a way of understanding regional traditions and folklore". But wasn't food an integral part of those "regional traditions and folklore"? Moreover, Italians - supposedly the subject of this book - never really make an appearance, except grouped together as statistics. A final chapter on "Food in Italy today" is rather tacked on, and not without errors.
· John Foot is reader in modern Italian history, department of Italian, University College London.
