“Each story has its personal magnificence,” Stanley Tucci instructed us over Negroni cocktails within the magical metropolis of Florence, when TV Information Journal tagged alongside because the actor and foodie shot the primary episode of his newest culinary journey via Italy. (Stanley Tucci: Trying to find Italy ran for 2 seasons on CNN.) On Sunday, Might 18, Nationwide Geographic’s Tucci in Italy kicks off with back-to-back episodes in Tuscany and Lombardy. For the remaining three, he ventures to Trentino-Alto Adige, Abruzzo, and Lazio.
The Conclave actor has a powerful connection to the Tuscan capital, having spent a memorable childhood yr in Florence along with his artist father and “superb prepare dinner” mom.
“I got here right here after I was 12 years previous,” he reveals. “We went round Florence and we traveled a bit bit via Italy. We had been capable of go to museums and church buildings. You had been all the time taught to have a look at all of the issues that most individuals wouldn’t usually take a look at.”
The day we met him, Tucci had breakfasted on the favored Florentine dish lampredotto (seen above), made out of a cow’s fourth abdomen. At lunch, we tried the vegetarian trippa finta — a dough of breadcrumbs, Parmesan cheese and eggs, topped with sauce — one of many previous peasant recipes revived at fashionable trattoria Dalla Lola. How the seemingly yucky dish of tripe reached standing as one of many metropolis’s beloved signatures is an ideal instance of the tales the sequence tells.
“The nice components of the meat had been stored for the royalty, aristocrats or clergy,” Tucci explains. “[Florentines] had been capable of create issues that no one else would with only a few components.”
Florence is a rich metropolis now, however that ingenuity hasn’t died. It’s thriving everywhere in the boot-shaped nation, the place Tucci samples hay soup and Roman pizza, interviews farmers and locals, even tries snowboarding — all for a deeper understanding of why Italians eat what they do. And he does all of it with dry humor.
“It might be Nationwide Geographic, however you’re not going to search out me climbing something,” Tucci guarantees. “You’ll discover me climbing into mattress at evening.”
Tucci in Italy, Collection Premiere, Sunday, Might 18, 8/7c, Nationwide Geographic