A Bite-Sized History of Italy: Gastronomic Tales of the Roman Empire, Renaissance, and Republic

Callegari (Dante’s Gluttons), an associate professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth, distills thousands of years of history for this delightful tour of Italian food and culture. She begins with the Aeneid, noting that Virgil describes Aeneas and his Trojan followers celebrating their arrival on the Italian peninsula with a meal, and continues through the fall of the Roman Empire, which spurred an increased focus on food as citizens sought to maintain ties to the culinary culture of antiquity. The Middle Ages saw Italian cuisine enriched by foreign spices like ginger and the cinnamonlike cassia, while the increasing influence of the Catholic church during the Renaissance reinforced the importance of wine as a core element of religious rituals. On a darker note, the author also probes links between Italian food and organized crime, noting how the mafia threatens restaurants into paying protection bribes and illegally traffics migrants to work its farms. Combining thorough history with evocative food writing (Italian anchovies, when fresh, “are more like tiny birds than fish, as they seem to float over the tongue, buoyed by seafoam, the flesh itself only barely perceptible”), Callegari delivers an informative and energetic exploration of cuisine as a cipher for both tradition and change. Italophiles will devour this. (June)