On Italian food and identity. Who gets to tell the story?
Inside and outside voices. Seeking a more honest way to talk about Italian food
This letter has been on my mind for months, and it took me two weeks to write. At least now I can turn my attention to the next stories. I hope you enjoy it.
This isn’t a manifesto or a complaint, but rather an open reflection. One voice among many. I hope it will invite more stories, more nuance, and a deeper sense of shared understanding. For that reason, it’s free to read and open to comments from everyone.
I had a dream, sixteen years ago, when I opened my blog, Juls’ Kitchen, and began writing in English. I wanted to share the beauty of Italian food with the world. To be honest, I hoped to become one of the most trusted voices doing just that.
Did I make it? Sixteen years on, this has become not just a job, but a family project. I work with an American publisher who pays me to write Italian cookbooks that travel far and wide. I still write—no longer on the blog, but here in this newsletter—about the things that spark my curiosity. And every year, hundreds of people from all over the world join our cooking classes.
I don’t know if I’ve become one of the most authoritative voices, but I’ve carved out my own little corner. Every day, I try to do my bit to go beyond the clichés and find my place in the general hum, which, oddly enough, is made harder simply by being Italian. But more on this later. Along the way, I’ve had moments to be proud of—like in 2019, when our blog won the Saveur Award for Best Food Culture Blog.
Still, I question myself constantly: my work, my skills, even my own beliefs. (The podcast DOI – Denominazione di Origine Inventata shook me to my core.) I don’t feel like I’ve “arrived”. If anything, I feel I’ve only just scratched the surface of what there is to learn about Italian food, and how best to share it with others.
But I must admit, I was left a little taken aback when I listened to an episode of the Cherry Bombe podcast, where host Kerry Diamond interviews Nadia Caterina Munno—better known on Instagram, where she has over five million followers, and on TikTok, as The Pasta Queen.
Kerry Diamond: Have you met Giada yet?
Nadia Caterina Munno: No.
Kerry Diamond: Okay. We have to get all of you together. I feel like there needs to be this Marvel universe of Italian cuisine superheroes. We'll get you, Giada, Stanley, Nigella.
Nadia Caterina Munno: Yes. We need to get all together.
Kerry Diamond: Nancy Silverton. Who else?
Nadia Caterina Munno: Yeah, the Italian “Avengers.”
When I heard Kerry Diamond suggest that all the voices of Italian cooking should be brought together into a Marvel-style universe—with Giada, Stanley, Nigella, Nancy, and of course, The Pasta Queen—I was a little surprised. She was crafting a pop pantheon of Italian cuisine, as it is perceived and narrated in the English-speaking world.
Stanley Tucci needs no introduction.
With his two most recent memoirs—Taste: My Life Through Food (2021) and What I Ate in One Year (2024)—and his CNN series Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, he’s become something of an ambassador for Italian cuisine around the world. He even curated the menu for the gala dinner at Highgrove Palace this past February, hosted by King Charles and Queen Camilla in honour of the Italian ambassador to London.
I haven’t had the chance to watch his show—truth be told, Somebody Feed Phil is more my kind of thing, with its playful, light-hearted tone—but when I found out that Tucci had paid a visit to Pietro Zito, the farmer-chef from Andria, my heart gave a little leap. Antichi Sapori in Montegrosso is hands down the most memorable dining experience I’ve ever had. I’ve returned there several times, each visit marking a different chapter of my life. It’s the sort of place you selfishly hope stays under the radar, far from the bucket-list crowd ticking off the “Top 10 Things to Eat in Italy.” What if, next time, I try to book a table and there’s no space left? In the meantime, you can find the segment on Pietro Zito here.
Stanley Tucci speaks of Italian food with the affectionate gaze of someone who knows it intimately: Calabrian roots, family recipes passed down through generations, Sunday lunches filled with familiar voices and gestures. And yet, he also brings a wry, measured tone, never treating food as something sacred or untouchable. He walks that fine line between culture and entertainment with remarkable ease.
Giada De Laurentiis may not be a household name here in Italy, but in the United States she’s one of the most prominent voices when it comes to Italian cooking.
As her surname suggests, she comes from one of Italy’s most iconic film families, but she’s also a businesswoman, a chef, a TV host, and the author of several cookbooks. Her latest book, Super-Italian, is a collection of 110 indulgent recipes made with the healthiest Italian ingredients. One of them, for instance, is a panzanella made with salmon.
What do I think of that recipe? Is it traditional? No. But Giada De Laurentiis doesn’t claim it is. I’d probably enjoy it if I saw it on a restaurant menu and decided to give it a try. And yet, it’s not the salmon that bothers me. It’s the way the panzanella is described: “the only constant is the delicious cubes of toasted bread, which soak up the lemony dressing like little sponges and explode in your mouth with every bite.”
But panzanella isn’t made with toasted bread, as it was created specifically to reuse stale bread. And this is where another issue comes in: the kind of bread commonly found in the US doesn’t really go stale, it tends to go moldy instead. So there’s a need to toast it in order to mimic the texture of proper panzanella.
Nigella Lawson is one of Britain’s finest food writers, known for her sensual and passionate approach to cooking.
She writes about food in a language that is evocative, deeply personal, and full of feeling, turning every dish into a little story. Her connection to Italy and its cuisine is genuine and longstanding; she’s loved it ever since she was a teenager. She even lived in Florence as a young woman, and speaks Italian fluently. This deep affection shines through in her 2012 book, Nigellissima: it is not a traditional Italian cookbook, but rather a heartfelt love letter to simplicity, conviviality, and the essential flavors of Italian food.
I truly appreciated what she wrote in the introduction. I found it honest, straightforward, and crystal clear. But then again, it’s Nigella:
“But the recipes that follow are not those that issued from Nonna’s kitchen: they are what I cook and, more importantly, how I cook, in mine. I’ve often joked that I pretend to myself that I’m Italian, but actually it is just that, a joke – against myself, more than anything – and I feel strongly that it is essential for me, in or out of the kitchen, to be authentic. What I am is an Englishwoman who has lived in Italy, who loves Italian food and has been inspired and influenced by that: my food and the way I cook demonstrate as much.”
In the English-speaking world, Italian food is often seen as either overly sophisticated or rigidly traditional. Nigella did the opposite: she spoke about it with ease and warmth, sharing recipes that feel familiar even to those who’ve never set foot in Italy. She built a cultural bridge, one rooted in respect for tradition but adapted to the everyday lives of her readers.
I fell professionally in love with Nancy Silverton when I watched her Chef’s Table episode.
Baker, chef, entrepreneur: everything she does speaks of a deep respect for ingredients and seasonality, values I hold close to my heart. She owns a home in Umbria, where she cooks, forages for wild herbs, and embraces the rhythm of everyday Italian life quietly, without fanfare.
At her restaurants in Los Angeles—Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza—she’s created a bridge between Italy and California, serving dishes that could have come straight from a traditional trattoria, yet speak fluently in the language of her own homeland.
There’s a quiet intelligence in her work: never flashy, always attentive to detail, always celebrating the beauty of simple things done well. In her Chef’s Table interview, she says:
“Italian food is not about complexity. It’s about the care you put into simple things.”
At the end of that episode, I found myself wondering: do we really have to leave Italy in order to be “allowed” to tell our own stories?
I often ask myself why those of us who live this culture day in and day out seem less visible in the media landscape. Perhaps it’s because our way of telling it is less theatrical. Perhaps it doesn’t translate as easily.
Being Italian doesn’t make me more qualified than other authors to write about Italian food. That much is clear. But it shouldn’t make me less qualified either. It shouldn’t make me any less appealing or capable of sharing our food culture with an international audience. And yet, I once came across an online conversation where an American tour guide, now living in Italy, claimed that Italians simply don’t have the tools to translate the culture they live and breathe every day for a foreign audience. In doing so, she implied a kind of silent hierarchy, where the outsider’s voice is seen as more “authentic,” simply because it’s been better tailored for an English-speaking public.
And that wasn’t the end of it. Years ago, during an online discussion with a few foreign colleagues living in Italy, someone told me, quite plainly: you’ll never be successful unless you move abroad.
The subtext was clear: if you want to write about Italian food for an international audience, you must either be a foreigner living in Italy, with the wide-eyed wonder of someone discovering a new world, or an Italian living abroad, viewing home through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia. So what does that make me, an Italian, living in Italy? Less credible? Less trustworthy? Less appealing to a magazine editor?
Perhaps the assumption is that, being so immersed in my own culture, I can’t explain it to those observing from the outside. As if I lacked the tools to translate my everyday life into a language that international readers could understand.
But here’s the risk: when stories are filtered and repackaged too much, we might end up amplifying the very stereotypes that are so hard to shake. A few years ago, I was teaching a class at a school for American students in Siena when some of the girls told me they were surprised to learn that Italians don’t go out for aperitivo every single evening. The idea that Italy is a land of aperitivo on a terrace, pizza, Vespas, and endless summer is a tough one to break, as I mention in this podcast episode.
And so I ask myself: who has the right to tell Italy’s story?
To that, I answer without hesitation: anyone, as long as it’s done with honesty. Some will speak from lived, everyday experience. Others will tell it as the land they chose for a new life, or as a cherished memory. What I dream of is a space for dialogue, where many voices—Italian, those with Italian roots abroad, and foreign enthusiasts—can coexist, without any of them being dismissed from the start.
Voices that are not Italian, or that view Italy from a different perspective, are essential. We’re already far too self-referential when it comes to food, so much so that these “other” voices bring a freshness we often forget, too busy as we are defending dogmas that treat Italian cuisine like a set of sacred commandments that must never be changed. We forget, for instance, that not so long ago we were all making carbonara with scrambled eggs and cubed smoked pancetta, or adding onions to amatriciana.
I’ve learned so much from non-Italian authors who write about Italian food. Often, they’ve taught me method, a certain rigor in research, but also a hunger to learn, to discover, to taste, to dig deeper. They’ve reminded me not to take things for granted, and to celebrate even the simplest, most familiar dishes. Because it’s there, in the little details, that our traditions live on and where you’ll find a very Italian way of seeing and doing things.
We Italians can be both our own harshest critics and the most theatrical caricatures when reacting to how others portray our cuisine.
When it’s an Italian sharing their own food culture, there’s no room for error: heaven forbid you tweak a traditional recipe to make it more accessible, or—true story—use the wrong finger placement when shaping orecchiette. That’s practically a crime.
And yet, when abroad—even in highly respected outlets like NYT Cooking—people share wildly reinterpreted versions of Italian dishes, there’s almost an expectation of outrage. The furious response from Italians has, somehow, become part of the charm: that’s just how they are, don’t mess with their food! But in the end, it’s not such a big deal, because Italian food belongs to everyone, right?
So, to try and bring all this together.
I don’t have answers to many of my questions, just a few thoughts I’ve attempted to gather in some kind of order.
There’s a deeply rooted idea that Italian cuisine must be told through a certain lens. Perhaps that’s why, so often, those who succeed in international food writing have a background that allows them to bridge two worlds.
And then there’s me (and many talented colleagues like me). Italian, living in Italy. Without the privilege of the outsider’s gaze, without the charm of the expat experience. But with a perspective that is just as valuable: that of someone who lives and breathes Italian food every single day, in an authentic, natural way—without needing to build an epic narrative around a simple plate of pasta al pomodoro. Still, the market tends to favor those who tell Italy from afar, because a romanticized version of our cuisine often sells better than reality.
I don’t want to create an idealised image of Italy. I want to tell the story of its food as it truly is: imperfect, ever-changing, sometimes contradictory, but always rooted in something real.
I don’t know if that will ever make me a superhero of Italian cuisine. But I do know I’ll keep writing and cooking with the awareness that you don’t have to leave home to understand who you are.
This is really important. I can't tell you how many time Anglophone Italian 'experts' have mansplained Italian food and culture to my Italian born husband. It's crazy! On the other hand, working in wine, I come up against the intersection of misogyny and xenophobia. Italian (men) I deal with talk over me, mansplain, or just talk to a man next to me if there is one. There is no possible way I, as an American and a woman, could possible know anything about Italian wine despite having more wine education, more wine experience, and taught a university level course called 'wines of Italy.'
I don't really believe in food expertise to be honest. I believe some people have a gift of guiding people through food and have a lot of knowledge and should absolutely share that knowledge.
Hello Giulia,
I just wanted to take a moment to applaud you for this brilliant article—it resonated with me beyond words. Not to appropriate your story, of course, but as a French food writer living in France, I saw so many parallels between our experiences and perspectives. Reading your words felt almost like reading my own thoughts on the page.
While France and Italy share that friendly culinary rivalry, it's fascinating to see how similar our cultural contexts can be. I spent 12 years in Canada, near the U.S. border, where the most famous names in French cuisine were people like Daniel Boulud, Jacques Pépin, David Lebovitz, and of course, Julia Child—either French chefs who moved to the U.S. or Americans who immersed themselves in France. It’s interesting how, despite not being household names here in France, they became icons abroad. As you so perfectly put it, they "bridge two worlds," offering an accessible, entertaining, and distinctly foreign perspective on French cuisine.
That idea—of not having the same “tools to translate my everyday life into a language that international readers could understand”—is something I feel deeply. As a French cook living in France, I sometimes wonder if I lack that sense of theatricality or the ability to make my world feel exotic to an international audience. But at the end of the day, whether we’re writing for a global readership or simply cooking in our own kitchens, honesty in our craft is what truly matters.
In Canada, my husband’s family (Italians immigrants) would always watch Lidia Bastianich’s cooking show on TV - she is quite popular. Is she known in Italy as well? I know her son made it over to Italy to be a host on Masterchef.
Thank you for putting these feelings into words. Your article was a gift!