A country of regions
Italy only became a single country in 1861, and its food still feels like twenty regional cuisines rather than one. The north, with its dairy cows and rice fields, cooks with butter, cream and RISOTTO; the south cooks with olive oil, tomatoes and dried pasta. POLENTA, a porridge of maize, was a staple of the poor north for centuries after maize arrived from the Americas, and before that a similar dish was made from other grains. The Italian government keeps an official list of more than five thousand traditional regional foods, and Italy has more foods with legally protected names than any other country in the European Union.
Risotto alla milanese is coloured gold with saffron, and a legend says a glassmaker's apprentice working on Milan's cathedral in 1574, known for adding saffron to his paints, tipped some into the rice at his master's wedding as a joke.
Ham from pigs that eat cheese whey
PROSCIUTTO di Parma is made from only two ingredients, pork and sea salt. The legs are salted by hand, then hung for at least a year in airy buildings in the hills near Parma, where the breeze is said to help them dry. The pigs are traditionally fed on whey, the liquid left over from making Parmesan cheese in the same region. SALAMI, cured and dried sausage, is made all over Italy in hundreds of local styles.
A meal might open with ANTIPASTO, meaning before the meal: cured meats, olives and BRUSCHETTA, bread toasted over coals and rubbed with garlic and olive oil, whose name comes from the Italian for to roast. A CAPRESE salad of tomato, mozzarella and basil comes from the island of Capri.
A protest at the Spanish Steps
In 1986 McDonald's opened a restaurant near the Spanish Steps in Rome. A journalist called Carlo Petrini organised a protest, handing out bowls of penne pasta to passers-by, and from that grew the Slow Food movement, which campaigns for local, traditional food and now has members in more than 150 countries. Italians have a few firm rules of their own too: many would never order a milky cappuccino after late morning, and the ESPRESSO comes at the end of the meal. An AFFOGATO, meaning drowned, is a scoop of GELATO drowned in hot espresso.
Sweets for festivals
PANETTONE, the tall, domed Christmas bread from Milan studded with candied fruit and raisins, is famously slow to make: the dough rises several times over two or three days, and bakers hang the finished cakes upside down to cool so they do not collapse. CANNOLI, crisp fried tubes filled with sweet ricotta, come from Sicily, where they were once made for the carnival before Lent. BISCOTTI means twice-cooked, because they are baked once as a loaf, sliced and baked again until hard, and the English word biscuit comes from the same idea.
The rest of the grid, from PIZZA and the CALZONE to LASAGNE, RAGU and TIRAMISU, and from FOCACCIA and CIABATTA to MINESTRONE, has its own pages across this category, and our Renaissance page covers the Italian cities where many of these dishes grew up.