The Regional Kitchens of Italy: Why There Is No Such Thing as Italian Cuisine

There is a misperception that nearly every traveller carries to Italy before their first visit: the belief that Italian cuisine is one thing. It is not. A cook from Bologna will regard you with genuine bewilderment if you ask them to add garlic to their ragù (it is not added); a Neapolitan cook will protest at the mere idea of cream in a carbonara; a Sicilian will not recognise as their own the preparations that the north calls Sicilian. Italy has been politically unified only since 1861, but its cooking predates that unification by centuries, when each city-state, each duchy, each kingdom had its own climate, its own soil, its own products and its own history of invasions and influences.

What unifies the cuisines of Italy is not a shared technique or ingredient but a philosophy: la cucina come si deve — cooking as it ought to be done — meaning with seasonal, regional ingredients prepared in the way that generations of accumulated experience have determined produces the best result. No shortcuts, no substitutions, no improvisation until the cook has been practising for decades. Italian food is profoundly conservative in the best sense: it conserves what works because what works has taken a very long time to discover.

The north: butter, risotto and the kitchen of the plains

The cooking of northern Italy — Piedmont, Lombardy, the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna — is built on butter, rice and cured meats rather than olive oil, durum-wheat pasta and tomato. Risotto is the north's dish: rice of the Carnaroli or Vialone Nano varieties grown on the Po plain is cooked slowly in stock, with progressive addition of liquid and constant agitation, until it reaches a specific creaminess called all'onda (wave-like) that rice in the south never achieves. Risotto alla Milanese adds saffron from the Abruzzo; risotto al radicchio uses the red chicory of Treviso; risotto al Barolo uses Piedmontese red wine.

Piedmont is perhaps Italy's most culinarily complex region: it has the country's finest wines (Barolo and Barbaresco from the Nebbiolo grape), the world's most precious truffle (the tartufo bianco d'Alba, available in autumn, priced to rival Iranian saffron) and a haute cuisine tradition that predates French classical cooking by centuries — the influence of the Savoy court on the development of French sauces is a documented historical fact. The Piedmontese fonduta, the vitello tonnato and the bollito misto are dishes of a depth that fits no simple category.

Emilia-Romagna: the most indulgent region in Italy

Emilia-Romagna — whose principal cities are Bologna, Modena, Parma and Ferrara — holds the unofficial title of the region with the greatest concentration of protected-origin gastronomic products in Italy. Parmigiano reggiano (genuine Parmesan, produced in the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Mantua and Bologna) ages for between twelve and thirty-six months until it develops a granular texture and a depth of umami flavour that has no equal among cheeses. Prosciutto di Parma — cured in air for a minimum of twelve months — and culatello di Zibello are the country's reference cured meats.

The ragù alla bolognese — misinterpreted outside Italy as a tomato sauce with minced meat — is in Bologna a very different preparation: a slow reduction of minced beef and pork with soffritto of carrot, onion and celery, white wine, milk and very little tomato, cooked for hours into a dark, dense and deeply flavoured sauce served not with spaghetti but with fresh egg tagliatelle — the pasta of Emilia — of a specific width. The Accademia Italiana della Cucina deposited the official recipe for tagliatelle al ragù with the Chamber of Commerce in Bologna in 1972, with the exact dimensions engraved on a gold plate.

Roman cooking and Lazio: the fifth quarter and simplicity

Rome has a cooking that reflects its history as a city of the working class: direct, assertive, built on the quinto quarto (the offal of the steer that in the butchers' hierarchy fell to the workers of the Testaccio slaughterhouse), with pasta that uses few ingredients and has enormous character. Cacio e pepe — pasta, Pecorino Romano and black pepper, nothing else — is one of the most technically difficult dishes to do well in Italian cooking: its three ingredients leave no room to hide flaws. Carbonara — guanciale (cured pig cheek), egg, Pecorino, pepper — is equally austere. Pasta all'amatriciana — guanciale, tomato, Pecorino, chilli — comes from the mountain village of Amatrice.

Roman quinto quarto — coratella (heart, liver and lungs of lamb), rognoni alla romana (kidneys), trippa alla romana (tripe with tomato and mint) and coda alla vaccinara (oxtail braised with celery, bitter chocolate and pine nuts) — is Rome's least known cooking outside Italy and its most deeply local. The Testaccio neighbourhood, site of the old slaughterhouse, remains the centre of this tradition: its osterias serve dishes that tourist restaurants in the historic centre rarely offer.

Naples and the south: the tomato, olive oil and the pizza

Neapolitan pizza is Italy's most internationally famous dish, and there is a reason UNESCO recognised the arte dei pizzaioli napoletani in 2017 as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Pizza margherita — tipo 00 flour dough, San Marzano tomato, buffalo mozzarella, olive oil and a basil leaf — has a simplicity that requires each component to be perfect: the San Marzano tomato, grown in the DOP zone around Vesuvius, has a sweetness and low acidity that no other tomato has; buffalo mozzarella is a cheese that deteriorates within hours and must be eaten fresh.

The south of Italy in general — Campania, Calabria, Puglia, Basilicata, Sicily, Sardinia — has distinct cuisines united by olive oil as the primary fat, tomato as a summer condiment, Mediterranean fish and the Arab, Norman, Greek and Spanish influence that successive invasions of the south left in the culture. Puglian cooking, based on vegetables, orecchiette (small ear-shaped pasta) and focaccia, is one of the most vegetable-forward in the country. Sicilian cooking has the most Arab flavour vocabulary in Italy: sweet-and-sour, the presence of raisins and pine nuts, the couscous of Trapani.

Wine as geography: from Nebbiolo to Nero d'Avola

Understanding Italian regional cooking requires understanding its wines, because in Italy each regional cuisine has its regional wine and the two have developed together over centuries. The Barolo and Barbaresco of Piedmont are drunk with the risotto, meat and white truffle of the same region; Brunello di Montalcino with the Maremma Tuscan cinghiale (wild boar); Amarone della Valpolicella with the bollito and aged cheeses of the Veneto; Chianti Classico with the bistecca alla fiorentina and ribollita.

Italian wine has more than 350 recognised indigenous grape varieties, many of which are grown nowhere else in the world. The Nerello Mascalese of Sicily, the Sagrantino of Umbria, the Timorasso of Piedmont, the Greco di Tufo of Campania: these are varieties that exist only in their regions and produce wines that only make sense alongside the food of that region. This correspondence between soil, grape and cooking is the definition of terroir in its fullest sense, and to eat a regional dish with the wine of the same region in the place where both were born is an experience that is genuinely difficult to reproduce outside that context.

How to travel through gastronomic Italy

The most common mistake of the traveller who goes to Italy for its food is to focus on starred restaurants or the most famous dishes rather than entering the system of the osteria, trattoria and neighbourhood fiaschetteria — the unpretentious establishments that serve local seasonal cooking with the regional wine at reasonable prices and with a fidelity to the ingredient that grand restaurants rarely surpass. The Roman osteria that serves cacio e pepe and coda alla vaccinara, the Bolognese trattoria that makes its own tagliatelle, the Neapolitan pizzeria with the wood-burning oven: these are the places where Italy eats.

The calendar matters too: in Italy cooking is radically and joyfully seasonal. Roman artichokes (carciofi alla romana) exist only in spring; porcini mushrooms only in autumn; the white truffle of Alba only between October and December; the best Ligurian pesto only with the young basil of May and June. A visitor who comes in the wrong season for the product they most want to taste will have to settle for imitations. And one who comes in the right season will understand why Italians defend their cooking with such passion: sometimes the world really is better than at any other moment.