by Joseph Harris Every city on this coast has a mother. Genoa has the sea, Venice has the lagoon, Naples has the volcano. Trieste has a decree. In 1719 the Emperor Charles VI declared a fishing town at the top of the Adriatic a free port of the Habsburg Empire, and his daughter Maria Theresa spent the next forty years building a city to fit the paperwork. She dredged the harbor, laid out the streets on a grid, and told the world that anyone could come and trade there without

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

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

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

by Joseph Harris There is a joke in Italy, and it has been running for twenty years without losing a step: Il Molise non esiste. Molise does not exist. It is on the t-shirts, in the memes, in a mock documentary that treated the region the way other films treat the moon landing. The premise is always the same. No one has ever met anyone from Molise. The photographs are staged. The maps print a shape between Abruzzo and Puglia to keep the coastline from looking broken. It is th

by Joseph Harris Most of the regions in our journals arrived through travel — a trip, a meal, a market, a kitchen in someone else's country where something clicked into place. Piedmont arrived differently. Piedmont did not wait for me to go there. It sent people instead. Three of them, to be precise. Three men connected to the hills of the Langhe, to the Nebbiolo grape, to the serious and uncompromising wine culture of northwestern Italy, who found their way to Mendocino Coun

by Joseph Harris There is a food show in Italy called Cibus. It happens in Parma, in the spring, and it is where the Italian food industry gathers — manufacturers large and small, importers, distributors, buyers, chefs, and a certain category of person who simply cannot stay away from a room that contains this much of what they love. We fell into the last category, though our credentials from the Mercato gave us VIP access and made it official. We had booked our flight to Ita

by: Joseph Harris There is a concept in the world of longevity research called a Blue Zone. The term came from a simple act — two scientists in 1999, mapping the villages in the mountainous Ogliastra province of Sardinia where men routinely lived past a hundred, drawing circles on the map in blue marker wherever the centenarians clustered. The blue circles gave the phenomenon its name. Dan Buettner later expanded the research globally and identified five places on earth where

by Joseph Harris We came to Siena from the south, which is the wrong direction if you want an easy introduction to the city. Siena doesn't have a simple entry point. The ancient center was built for foot traffic and horses, not automobiles, and the Sienese have made no particular accommodation for the modern error of arriving by car. There are narrow one-way streets that go nowhere useful, surveillance cameras that record your mistakes, and a general architectural consensus t

Our journey brings us to Tuscany—a region that feels instantly familiar, even if you’ve never been. Known for its rolling hills, cypress-lined roads, and timeless countryside, Tuscany is home to cities like Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, and Siena, where tradition still shapes daily life. It’s a place where art, history, and food are inseparable—where every meal feels grounded in something older, something lasting. A Culture Rooted in the Land Tuscany is often d

This week, our Tour of Italy takes us to Lombardy, a region of contrasts, where grand cities meet alpine landscapes, and refined cuisine is shaped by both land and tradition. Home to Milan, Italy’s fashion and financial capital, Lombardy is often seen as modern and fast-paced. But beyond the city, the region opens into serene lakes like Lake Como and Lake Garda, rolling countryside, and mountain villages where culinary traditions remain deeply rooted and quietly preserved. A

For Kirsten Powers, somewhere in Puglia By Joseph Harris Kirsten, I hear you found a trullo. Good. You always struck me as someone who understood that the best decisions look slightly irrational from the outside. Moving to the heel of Italy’s boot — that narrow, sun-hammered peninsula that juts into the Adriatic like an afterthought — is exactly the kind of move that makes complete sense once you’ve walked your own land, stood among your own olive trees, and tasted the bread.