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245 Chapter 13 Italian Food on Foreign Tables: Giacomo Castelvetro’s Exile Mary-Michelle DeCoste Italian food existed before Italy itself. Cut off from the rest of Europe by both the Alps and the sea, a peninsula fragmented into states with shifting borders and various forms of government, Italy did not exist as a unified country until 1861. Already by the second half of the fifteenth century, however , culinary texts defined an “Italy” characterized by particular foods and food practices. These early texts favour ingredients and approaches common throughout the peninsula rather than focusing on the regional differences fetishized by modern writing on Italian food. The notion of an Italian cuisine circulated both within and outside of Italy, and indeed Italian cooks were praised throughout Europe during the Renaissance. This Italian supremacy gradually ceded to new ways of cooking and eating developed in France in the seventeenth century. Giacomo Castelvetro, nephew of the better-known Ludovico, was born in Modena on March 25, 1546, and died in London in 1616, having been exiled from Italy by Venetian Counter-Reformation authorities for distributing anti-CounterReformation pamphlets. He thus lived during this last period of Italian culinary renown before the rise of French cuisine. His Brieve Racconto di tutte le Radici, di tutte l’Herbe, et di tutti i Frutti che crudi o cotti in Italia si mangiano (translated as The Fruits, Herbs, and Vegetables of Italy) of 1614, dedicated to Lucy, the Countess of Bedford, contains descriptions of and instructions for growing a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and nuts eaten in Italy, and explains how to prepare them for the table; many of these foods were unknown or little known in England at the time. Castelvetro wrote this little book primarily to secure a patron, and he pitched it to Lucy by intertwining subjects he knew to be of mutual interest: Italian language Chapter 13 246 and culture (Italian was quite chic in England at this time, and Lucy spoke and wrote it well) and gardening. Castelvetro also knew that Lucy was sympathetic to his religious beliefs , and punctuating the descriptions of Italian fruits and vegetables are a number of remarks disparaging the papist practices of Italy. As Paola Ottolenghi writes in her book on Castelvetro, the author relates with patrons and would-be patrons “as an exile and thus as a professional observer , closed within the bitter limits of a double restriction: flight from the Inquisition and the necessity of service….” (1982, 25; my translation). As Ottolenghi writes elsewhere in her book, however, “Castelvetro never cuts himself off from the motherland, neither culturally nor emotionally” (6; my translation). My aim here is to demonstrate the way in which Castelvetro combines the “double restriction” of flight from the Inquisition and the necessity of service with the irresistible pull he feels to share his love and knowledge of Italian fruits and vegetables and how best to eat them. Castelvetro uses descriptions of Italian food to articulate a national identity coloured by the exile’s longing for home. At the same time, he connects his love of Italian fruits and vegetables with his love of language and his Protestant religious convictions. While the linking of food and national and religious identity is certainly not unique to Castelvetro, his particularly clever presentation is special. Castelvetro deploys his discourse on food to create a national and a religious identity based in part on a protest of the religion of his homeland and in praise of that of his adopted country. He must separate Italian food from Italian religion, creating new associations that allow him to identify himself as a Protestant who is still very Italian. My reading of Castelvetro’s text draws on the work of anthropologists and cultural historians such as Peter Bishop, who writes, “diet’s relationship to cultural identity … [is] on a par with language in terms of cultural definition ” (1991, 3). The parallel between diet and language drawn by Bishop is particularly interesting to me here, because these are the two loci of Italianness privileged by Castelvetro, who, besides being a gardening enthusiast, was also a publisher of Italian books in England and an Italian language tutor . Although Bishop’s claim is certainly not self-evident to many historians and anthropologists, Castelvetro quite clearly considers food grown in Italy and prepared according to Italian customs to be an important part of Italian culture and his own identity as an Italian. For example, in discussing the fruits and vegetables that...

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