What is Italian cuisine? That seems like an easy question to answer however a deeper look shows that it's not so easy. Things change. Traditional cuisine is both an abstract and concrete cultural artifact, a reflection of a people and their customs, which themselves change along with their food and their cooking as changes occur in their agriculture, their commerce, their trade, and their economy. Traditional cuisine is also a part of collective memory that forges the part of material culture that can be produced and consumed. A culture’s cuisine is not immutable but changes over time along with cultural and economic changes. Italy is complicated: is it a multitude of regional and provincial cuisines or is there a “national” Italian cuisine?

Clifford A. Wright won the James Beard Cookbook of the Year award and the James Beard award for the Best Writing on Food in 2000 for A Mediterranean Feast. His most recent book, An Italian Feast, is a sequel to that book. He is the author of 18 other books on cooking, food, politics, and history.