‘Renaissance man’ Stanley Tucci travels to Italy in mouth-watering food and travel show

Stanley Tucci: Searching For Italy ★★★★

Stanley Tucci’s sumptuous six-part series should come with a warning: it will make you hungry and it might motivate you to throw aside caution and concerns about cost and impulsively book a flight to Rome. Made for CNN in 2021, Searching for Italy has been frustratingly elusive for fans of the multi-talented Mr Tucci, as it screened for a limited time on Foxtel early in that year and then vanished. Now, happily, it’s reappeared.

The American actor, author, Instagram star and reliably entertaining talk-show guest explores his Italian heritage in the series. “I’m travelling across Italy to discover how the food in each of this country’s 20 regions is as unique as the people and their past,” he explains.

Stanley Tucci’s food and travel show will make you hungry and prompt you to book a ticket to Italy.Credit: SBS

He starts his tour in Tuscany’s capital, Florence, awed by the history and the architecture, and revisiting a life-changing destination for his family. The Tuccis spent a year there in the early 1970s so that Stanley’s art teacher father, Stan, could study figure drawing and sculpture. Meanwhile, his mother, Joan, learnt to cook. Both appear in the episode, with mother and son preparing a vegetable sauce, salsa Maria Rosa, named for the neighbour who taught her the recipe. It’s an early indication of the warmth and appreciative sense of connection that infuses the series.

Anyone who’s read Tucci’s delightful autobiography, Taste: My Life Through Food, seen his Instagram videos – he has 3 million followers – or watched him in action on Graham Norton’s red couch won’t be surprised to learn that in this series he’s an erudite, enthusiastic, witty and charming guide. He travels the country talking to an array of people – chefs, restaurateurs, winemakers, fishermen – who proudly proffer their staples and specialities, which he savours with palpable pleasure. It also helps that he speaks the language.

In Tuscany, he eats high and low: the type of premium steaks cultivated for the wealthy, society-shaping Medici family of the 1500s, and “poor food”, humbler fare involving bread and beans. He attends a wheat-threshing festival and a society event, embarks on an illuminating bar crawl, and tastes rustic and refined versions of panzanella, as well as cacciucco (fish stew) and cantucci (almond biscotti) dunked in vin santo. While marvelling at the amount of bread consumed in the region, he maintains his distaste for the local variety, which he describes as tasting like cardboard due to its lack of salt. The possible reasons for that absence are explored and they’re funny and surprising.

For the second episode, it’s on to Sicily as he ponders: “How did one of the poorest regions in Europe create the richest of cuisines?” Touring the island, he finds that “every mouthful here is an eruption of flavour”, as he visits a self-taught, Michelin-starred chef in Bagheria, a pioneering female winemaker in Vittoria, a princess in Palermo and then a fisherman and his family on the tiny island of Lampedusa. Tucci aficionados will be happy to note that the menu in the regal royal villa includes versions of the timballo, the showpiece dish in Big Night, Tucci’s beautiful 1996 film about two New Jersey brothers preparing to close their struggling Italian restaurant with a final lavish banquet.

A scene from season one of Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.Credit: SBS

Glowing with vibrant colours and vitality, Searching for Italy looks beautiful. Yet to Tucci’s credit and that of the producers, in Sicily the problems of the island aren’t ignored because they’re ostensibly making a sunny and celebratory show about culture and cuisine. The dark mafia-dominated past is documented, as is the troubled present with its unceasing flow of refugees, a modern tragedy of desperation and death.

While SBS’ On Demand service opens with the episode about Naples and the Amalfi Coast, the linear service isn’t showing the series in its original order, not that it really matters, as the episodes are self-contained. But maybe someone thought that Tuscany and Sicily were juicier attractions for a local audience. Other episodes feature Milan, Bologna and Rome. A second eight-episode season was made in 2022 and its itinerary includes Venice, Umbria and Puglia, as well as an episode in London exploring the influence of Italian food on the English. CNN cancelled the show in December 2022, but Tucci has indicated that he’ll continue to make it without them, which is good news, as many of us would happily follow this Renaissance Man wherever he goes.

Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy is on SBS, Thursday, 8.30pm, and SBS On Demand.

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