In this colourful portrait of a vital culinary art thousands of years old, the story is told of ancient symposia and papal Renaissance banquets, of famous cookery books and simple fish dishes, of the triumph of pasta and of the roots of Cucina Povera, the healthy country cuisine with its legendary Mediterranean diet. For it is precisely the regional diversity from the Alps to the tip of the boot that proves to be an inexhaustible fund of culinary creativity.

Italian cuisine today is so alive and successful because it can always draw inspiration from its rich culinary heritage. Over 2500 years before pizza and pasta became global, southern Italian Greeks practiced the first high cuisine in Europe. The international delicatessen trade of the Roman Empire enabled exquisite and creative recipe fusions. The Sicilian Arabs made sugar and oranges, rice and pasta, artichokes and aubergines native to medieval Italy. The risotto of the Doge of Venice's Risi e Bisi or the peppered meat of the Renaissance architect Brunelleschi are today again being recooked in Venetian or Tuscan osterias, while the young star chefs of the South take it for granted that a Spanish-dyed Cucina Barocca is the perfect accompaniment to fish with onion jam and candied tomatoes.

This history of Italian cuisine spans a wide arc from the time of the Romans to today's Italian global cuisine. Although this book is not a cookery book, but a cultural history, numerous recipes are of course also presented - from the gourmet delights of the ancient Romans to the cuisine of the nobility and the popes and the worldwide triumphal procession of Italian cuisine in recent decades.