by Joseph Harris La Sicilia Occidentale · the rulers left, the people stayed, the food remained The first Sicily chapter in this book made an argument about the whole island: that Sicily is what fusion cooking looks like when nobody is performing it, three thousand years of the same ingredients passed through different hands until the harmony had the integrity of a thing that simply accumulated. I stand by every word of it. But an island is too big a table to set on a Tuesday

by Joseph Harris Rome is where tourism becomes history. Every other city in this book gathers its own people around its own table. Bologna feeds the Bolognese. Orvieto eats cooked water on top of its rock because that is what Orvieto has always eaten. That is the pattern of Italy, twenty countries each convinced it has the best of everything, and this series has been cooking its way through it since March. Rome breaks the pattern. Rome did not gather its own people around its

by Joseph Harris Orvieto does not sit on a hill. It sits on a single block of volcanic tufa that rises three hundred feet straight out of the valley floor, with cliffs on every side, and from a distance the town looks less like a place people built than like a place that was already there and people moved into. The Etruscans thought so, they called it Velzna and made it one of the twelve cities of their league. When Rome finally took it in the third century before Christ, the

Bologna La Dotta, la Grassa, la Rossa Tuesday, September 1 Bologna has three names and uses all of them. La Dotta, the learned, for the oldest university in the world. La Grassa, the fat, for the table. La Rossa, the red, for the brick and for the politics. Cities collect nicknames the way people do, by being talked about, and any city that can carry three adjectives for nine hundred years and still argue about which one comes first is a city worth a Tuesday. Tonight is the c

by Joseph Harris In April we went to Liguria and stopped, as everyone stops, in Genoa. That was Beppe's night, the pesto, the marble mortar, the memory of a grandmother's kitchen above the Ligurian Sea. Tonight, we return to the same region and drive the other way, west along the narrowing coast toward France, to the end of Italy. Except that calling it the end of Italy assumes the border means something. Here, it never has. Begin at the end. In 1923, Mussolini took two tow

The first Abruzzo chapter in this book opens at a festival in Rimini, at a long table full of Alpini, with a salt-baked branzino that made us friends for an evening. But I have already told that story. Something else happened at that festival, out in the street, between the beer gardens, and it is the beginning of this chapter. The streets of that town were full of smoke, and the smoke was full of lamb. Everywhere the Alpini gathered, there were long narrow iron troughs glo

by Joseph Harris Kathleen books our trips, and she books them the way other people compose music. The Italy trip was the smoothest I have ever taken, trains that met us, hotels that expected us, and regions that unfolded in the right order. Woven through all that competence were her surprises, which she plants like landmines of delight and detonates without warning. There were two on that trip. The second went off later, in Rimini, when our hotel turned out to be Fellini's Gr

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by Joseph Harris Every cook I've known has a blind spot on the map, and for most of my life mine sat in the top right corner of Italy. I could tell you what they eat in every region from the Alps to the toe, I've now cooked my way through nearly all of them on Tuesday nights in this dining room, but Friuli stayed a rumor. Then I started reading, and I found the oldest reversal in the country, Friuli is not some outpost of Venice. Friuli is Venice's mother. Aquileia, on the Fr