Throughout most of Italian history, most Italians rarely ate pasta.
It was a regional habit, limited to a few areas and a few forms. Pasta only became central to Italian food in the 20th century, once the country industrialized, a middle class emerged, and people started eating beyond whatever grew down the road.
Panettone tells a similar story. Sweet, fruit-studded breads go back to the Renaissance, but the towering boxed panettone sold around the world is mostly a 20th-century creation of a few big companies.
“All of the dishes that we associate with Italian-ness are either Italian-American inventions or more recent Italian inventions that aren’t really anchored in this super deep history,” says Danielle Callegari, associate professor of Italian.
That gap, between the Italy we picture and the one that actually exists, animates Callegari’s new book. A Bite-Sized History of Italy: Tales of the Roman Empire, Renaissance, and Republic charts that history through what Italians put on the table.
Library Journal calls it “a riveting and fascinating book,” and Kirkus Reviews describes it as “a delightful journey.” The book is the second volume in The New Press’s Bite-Sized History series, after a history of France and ahead of one on Mexico.
Italy didn’t become a nation until 1861, but a shared food culture, Callegari argues, bound Italians together long before.
A scholar at home in two worlds
Callegari almost didn’t write it. The New Press first called when she’d just arrived at Dartmouth, and she said no. Tenure in the humanities depends on academic monographs, and she was still finishing her first book, Dante’s Gluttons, a study of how Dante uses food as a moral and civic language.
The New Press circled back in December 2023, the same week her tenure dossier was due. “We’re convinced you’re the person to write this book,” she recalls them saying. So she said yes, got tenure that summer, and got to work.
Writing for everyone turned out to be harder than she expected. Her academic colleagues read the early chapters and told her to “make it more fun.” The note she kept getting, and eventually took to heart: make it something people can read on the beach this summer.
That pull toward a wider audience runs through Callegari’s career. She’s a medievalist who reviews Italian wine for Wine Enthusiast. She co-hosts Gola, a popular podcast on Italian food and drink, with her friend Katie Parla. She co-founded Cabinet Travel, which leads food and wine tours of Italy. In 2023 she convened Territorio, a Dartmouth symposium that brought scholars, winemakers, writers, and chefs together to talk about food, place, and belonging. Last December she moderated a panel on sustainable agriculture co-hosted by Dartmouth and the American Academy in Rome.
The two careers feed each other, she says. “I find energy for both from each other. When I get frustrated or feel limited in one space, I pivot to the other, and that re-energizes me.”
The classroom reinvigorates her more than anything. “There’s nothing that makes me feel better than an hour with my students getting to talk about Dante,” she says. “Full stop.”
Callegari says she learned to hold those worlds together from John Freccero, her late mentor and one of the most influential scholars of Dante, to whom the book is dedicated. Freccero was a deeply learned medievalist who counted Julia Child among his friends. “He just loved food and wine, and those things very organically went hand in hand,” she says. “People who love learning invite that kind of exchange.”
What the food gives away
Callegari pushes back on how food history usually gets told. We assume people ate whatever the land gave them, she writes, or whatever was easiest and cheapest to put on the table. But what people eat is shaped just as much by culture and belief.
From the outside, for example, Italy looks uniformly Catholic. But the Italikim, Jews who lived on the peninsula long before the diaspora, were there from the beginning. When Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews arrived later, many after Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, they brought new ingredients and traditions to a foundation that was already deeply Italian. Sicily complicates the map further: centuries of Islamic rule shaped its language and learning so deeply that the island still belongs as much to North Africa and the Near East as to the rest of Italy.
The kitchen is where those histories show up. In the rural south, for example, the midwinter slaughter still anchors the year, and almost none of the animal goes to waste. Pig fat was the great equalizer of the Italian kitchen: cheap, long-keeping, good for nearly anything. But it’s forbidden under kosher law. So Jewish cooks improvised, and Italian Jewish frying became an art of its own, giving the world carciofo alla giudea, a whole artichoke Callegari describes as “fried to golden, crackling perfection.” These dishes, she writes, “capture the tension of... being perceived as both insiders and outsiders.”
Callegari documents how Italians themselves have long fought over what counts as authentically Italian. But she refuses to play purist, delighting in the Americanized versions, Olive Garden included.
“One of the privileges that comes with being considered an expert is that you can also push back against people who are snobby or dismissive of certain expressions of culture, and also have fun with it,” she says. Her medievalist friends, she points out, love Medieval Times and Game of Thrones. “The divergences are some of the most exciting things to keep your eye on.”
Close-reading the cookbooks
Callegari opens the book with Ada Boni, author of Il talismano della felicità (The Talisman of Happiness), a fixture on Italian shelves for generations. Boni had little patience for her readers. A woman might have a degree, speak foreign languages, even “drive a luxurious automobile with a firm hand,” she writes, but if she can’t manage a properly coddled egg, she’s missed something essential.
Boni assumes her reader is a woman of means who can’t really cook, which, Callegari writes, “inverts completely the stereotype of the Italian nonna at the stove, housecoat speckled with tomato sauce, hair pinned up, identity contained to the pot in front of her.”
Boni’s book, and cookbooks like it, Callegari argues, are exactly the kind of source the academy has long waved off as unserious: domestic, feminine, mere manuals. “Female-authored cookbooks are some of the most exciting texts for interrogation,” she says, “because they’ve barely been scratched by people who are thinking in this more formal way.” (Parla, Callegari’s Gola co-host, recently produced a new English edition of Boni’s classic cookbook.)
Boni and the Italian American cookbook pioneer Marcella Hazan are, to Callegari’s mind, the two voices that quietly built the world’s understanding of Italian food, one on each side of the Atlantic. “I think we absorbed a lot of what they told us without anyone realizing it or giving full credit,” she says. She quotes Hazan at length in the book, drawn by the clarity of her prose.
Callegari folds recipes into the book too, though she’s quick to say she’s no master in the kitchen. “I don’t consider myself to be a great cook,” she says. “I am definitely just a writer who sometimes cooks.”
The recipes, she says, including a recreation of a bread from ancient Pompeii, function in part as a teaching device. They were “a tool in a grander scheme,” a way to carry the book’s arguments through something “more interactive, hopefully playful,” and even, she hopes, to “evoke an experiential learning element.”
Ultimately, though, Callegari wants the book enjoyed more than studied. She returns to Hazan’s conviction that Italian food is “not a challenge to be won, but... simply there to be enjoyed, mostly on its own terms.” Her book, she writes, is the same.