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Eating Up Italy:
Voyages on a Vespa

by Matthew Fort



      The cover illustration riffing off Botticelli's Venus is perfect, because this is a thoroughly sensual, even voluptuous, read. Matthew Fort has decided to settle the question of whether his life-long love affair with Italy - its light, landscape, food, wine and people - is true love or merely infatuation. His method? Go on a voyage of exploration via Vespa scooter (slowish, sensible, and an Italian icon) from Italy's southernmost tip to Turin in the north. While one of Fort's virtues as a travel companion lies in unobtrusively helping us notice the various scenes, the planned focus of the journey is food. How better to understand a people with a universal passion about what they eat, where it is from, and how it is made? This is a place where even young children "talk about food with matter-of-fact intelligence", debating different regions' salamis as pre-teens elsewhere might debate pop stars. Italian cuisine might seem divisive because of its regional chauvinism (a taxi driver comments that Italians not only speak in dialect, they eat in dialect too), but because of this shared passion it's really a unifying factor.

Fort's evocative writing lets you vicariously experience the changing landscapes, vivid characters, and sublime food that he finds along back roads and highways, amongst market stall owners, innkeepers, farmers and just plain people. All the while considering its roots and how likely it is to last. If the voluptuous descriptions of the taste, feel, look and smell of these feasts inspire you (and how could they not?), the book is well endowed with recipes as well. Some of them I'll probably never make, but they are all easy to follow and include ones simple enough - such as the best pasta e fagioli I've ever made - for even an entry-level cook.

Great food, great writing, great travel - three of my favorite things. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy of Eating Up Italy, then settle in with it and a homemade feast of your own to share the Italian passion for food. Highly recommended.

The Book

Centro Books
Sept 2006
Trade Paperback
1-933572-02-7
978-1-933572-02-4SBN
Travelogue/Cookbook
More at Amazon.com US|| UK
Excerpt
NOTE: Amazon UK link is to a different edition

The Reviewer

Kim Malo
Reviewed 2007
NOTE:
© 2006 MyShelf.com