Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
An Urban Kitchen
Northern Italian food is city food originating from one of the richest urban cultures on the
planet. Peasants may have toiled in the fields, but they rarely had the means to eat anything
more exciting than wild garlic, greens, leeks and polenta. The latter, a coarsely ground bar-
ley/farro/spelt/chestnut-meal (maize was not cultivated in Europe until the 16th century),
has been a staple since Roman times and such was the consumption that regular outbreaks
of pellagra (a devastating disease caused by niacin deficiency) were common. Baked, fried
or grilled, modern variations include
polenta taragna
(with buckwheat flour),
polenta un-
cia
(made with cheese) and
missultin e polenta
(cooked with dried fish from Lake Como).
The people with the knowledge to transform the country's growing abundance of in-
gredients wasn't the peasantry but the inhabitants of wealthy and cosmopolitan cities like
Milan, Pavia, Verona, Cremona, Brescia and Mantua. With the rise of Venice's mercantile
empire in the 10th century, northern Italy was at the vanguard of Europe's transformation
from an agricultural society to a medieval powerhouse of trade. As Venetian and Genoese
seamen offloaded their cargoes of spices, sugar cane, saffron, figs, lemons, almonds and
more from around the Mediterranean, so tradesmen distributed them via northern Italy's
navigable network of rivers that connected Milan to Lake Maggiore and Como, Venice to
Vicenza and Mantua to Ferrara, Parma and Piacenza. By the 13th century cartloads of wine
were trundling over the Brenner pass into Austria.
Powerful clans such as the Della Scala family in Verona, the Gonzaga's in Mantua and
the Sforza's in Milan competed for a slice of the profits, dividing up and taxing the coun-
tryside and establishing themselves as political dynasties. It was in this competitive, com-
mercial environment that Italy's great cuisine was born.
Born in Dumenza on Lake Maggiore, Bartolomeo Scappi was one of the greatest cooks of the Italian
Renaissance. In his six-volume
Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi
(1570) he left a meticulously illustrated monument
to the aspirations of Italian Renaissance cuisine.
