Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22216 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-20
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Observer
'This delightful and enticing book makes your mouth water just to read it.'

Synopsis
In an epic scooter trip from the South to the North of Italy, award-winning food writer Matthew Fort explores the local gastronomy, culinary culture and tumultuous history of a country. Taking as his starting point Melito Di Porto Salvo, the southernmost town on mainland Italy, Fort eats, drinks, and talks his way through Calabria, rich in spices and Arabian-influences, and on to Campania, where he falls in love with Naples, but despairs of its Pizza. He crosses the remote, mountainous landscape of Molise and adjoining Abruzzo, with their delicious cheeses and traditional lamb dishes. In Emilia-Romagna, he revels in La Salama da Sugo of Ferrara and Risotto alla Pilota of Mantua. He nips into Lombardy where he falls foul of heartless hoteliers and is refreshed at a trades union rally, finally passing through Piedmont where the cooking of France and Northern Europe fuses with that of Italy. As he travels on his scooter, Fort examines the country through its food and the people who produce it. He discovers a land where regional differences are still vibrantly alive, and uncovers the rich connection between history, tradition and cuisine.

The enticing sum of these parts - the dishes, producers, ingredients, consumers and eating occasions - is nothing less than a contemporary portrait of the country.

Customer Reviews

Delightful and Delicious
Matthew Fort's epic scooter ride up the thigh-boot of Italy is a truly delicious read. Every aspect of the fascinating and varied Italian life he encountered is amusingly reflected upon in his lightly erudite prose. I thought his acknowledgement of feeling homesick (unlike Thesiger et al) was particularly endearing and the description of his amateurish Vespa riding in Naples most entertaining.Mr Fort was the restaurant critic for The Guardian, a foodie professional, but the gusto with which he describes the various meals he was presented with en route shows a boyish enthusiast peeping through the culinary afficionado. The recipes, which are added to each chapter-ending, are splendidly simple but totally mouthwatering.What Mr Fort has managed to do is deftly mix an amusing travel diary, rich with incident & character, with a gourmet's guide to the regional idiosyncrasies of Italian cooking. YUMMY!

food from fort
Are you, like me, tired of all these remorselessly microscopic, one-theme books? You know, three times as much as you ever wanted to know about socks, and their previously unregarded, unrevealed and crucial impact on world civilisation and culture, that sort of thing? Do you ever pine for a bit of grand discursion, an anecdote here, a fascinating fact there; for an amiable companion rather than some zealot of minutiae or lazy hack padding out the best they came up with at lunch with their publisher? I must say I didn't hold out much hope about Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa. Another foodie boring on about fancy sausages, I thought. And on a Vespa: a miserly, fit sort of foodie to boot, I thought. And he writes for The Guardian. What a splendid surprise, then, to come across Matthew Fort, fat and flabby and over-50 by his own account, and a mesmerisingly entertaining man to travel with the length of Italy. A man, true, obsessed by food far too much than is good for him or his poor Vespa; but a man, too, who can convey that passion, make the sex life of the snail a thing of fascination, and, yes, even make fancy sausages interesting: read his encounter with the five sausage butchers of Salmona if you don't believe me. Add to this some memorable facts - did you know that Goethe was a foodie, or what excess carried off Cavour? - and accounts, particularly of scootering in Naples, accomplished with wit and not a little confided wisdom. Fort even tells us why the Italians talk so much, a condition he clearly shares and relishes. There are well laid-out recipes for the stuff he so lovingly describes, although I felt "sauce of castrated lamb" also lost something in the translation. Va voom bene!

va voom bene!
Are you, like me, tired of all these remorselessly microscopic, one-theme books? You know, three times as much as you ever wanted to know about socks, and their previously unregarded, unrevealed and crucial impact on world civilisation and culture, that sort of thing? Do you ever pine for a bit of grand discursion, an anecdote here, a fascinating fact there; for an amiable companion rather than some zealot of minutiae or lazy hack padding out the best they came up with at lunch with their publisher? I must say I didn't hold out much hope about Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa. Another foodie boring on about fancy sausages, I thought. And on a Vespa: a miserly, fit sort of foodie to boot, I thought. And he writes for The Guardian. What a splendid surprise, then, to come across Matthew Fort, fat and flabby and over-50 by his own account, and a mesmerisingly entertaining man to travel with the length of Italy. A man, true, obsessed by food far too much than is good for him or his poor Vespa; but a man, too, who can convey that passion, make the sex life of the snail a thing of fascination, and, yes, even make fancy sausages interesting: read his encounter with the five sausage butchers of Salmona if you don't believe me. Add to this some memorable facts - did you know that Goethe was a foodie, or what excess carried off Cavour? - and accounts, particularly of scootering in Naples, accomplished with wit and not a little confided wisdom. Fort even tells us why the Italians talk so much, a condition he clearly shares and relishes. There are well laid-out recipes for the stuff he so lovingly describes, although I felt "sauce of castrated lamb" also lost something in the translation. Va Bene!