Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well by Pellegrino Artusi, Murtha Baca, Luigi Ballerini Read Free Book Online

of the staples consumed day in and day out by the lower classes were indeed the talk of the nation. Ideas were conceived, proposals examined, projects debated. They ranged from the bizarre to the tragic, and none was found that could resolve the problem. Professor Paolo Mantegazza, a pathologist and Darwinian whose lectures in anthropology and ethnology at the Istituto di Studi Superiori of Florence (where he began to teach in 1870) were assiduously attended by his good friend Pellegrino Artusi, suggested a truly astonishing way out of the predicament. Mantegazza joined in the widespread condemnation of the nutritional poverty of the food habitually consumed by the lower classes (“Of all his dishes, the poor city dweller prizes most of all his soup which is meager nourishment even if consumed in large volumes; the poor country dweller lives but for polenta and yellow bread …, a barely digestible and niggardly food that makes his blood listless and ill”). Having traveled extensively in Latin America, and having noticed the prodigious effects of coca leaves chewed by Andean peasants, he declared that their diffusion among the working classes would stymie the onslaught of hunger from which they perpetually suffered. Mantegazza, who wrote extensively on the subject, beginning with “Sulle virtù igieniche e medicinali della coca” (On the medicinal and hygenic virtues of coca; Milan, 1859), and who is likely to have been the first to advocate the introduction of the plant to Europe, made his point with a “symptomatically reassuring” stylistic levity: “A pinch of leaves chewed slowly and gently during the day helps us to smoke fewer cigars, it warms our hearts and lungs, and it sustains us above all during hard physical labor and especially during longmarches.” 69 His “revolutionary” line of thinking met, apparently, with little enthusiasm.
    A second, much more persuasive strategy would be adopted by agencies of the Italian government with the unconditional approval of the reigning monarch. Four years after the despicable handling of the Sicilian Fasci, thousands of people took to the streets of Milan to protest economic policies that had reduced them to utter destitution: they were brutally mowed down by the soldiers of General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris. 70 Fifty years earlier the Milanese had rebelled against the Austrian rulers of their city in an attempt, officially celebrated as “The Five Days of Milan,” to join the Piedmontese in the creation of a unified nation. God only knows how many of those who defied the Italian army with stones and sticks had reason to regret the patriotism of their forebears. After four days of fighting, one hundred people (two of them soldiers) lay dead in the streets. Four hundred and fifty people were wounded and eight hundred arrested. A month later King Umberto awarded Bava Beccaris the prestigious Cross of “Grande Ufficiale” for “the great service rendered to civilization and its institutions.” Two years later anarchist Gaetano Bresci assassinated the king.
    There were other “solutions” to the problem of hunger: emigration and colonial expansion. Italy did not refrain from trying either. Between 1891 and 1911 millions of Italians resettled in North or South America, referred to respectively – on the basis of the time it took to get there – as
America corta
(Short America) and
America longa
(Long America). Central to the narrative of
Sull’oceano
, the theme of emigration, with depictions of the pains and lacerations caused by this massive uprooting, recurs in many other works by De Amicis, including
Cuore
. Significantly, one of the “monthly tales” punctuating
Cuore
bears the title “Dagli Appennini alle Ande” (From the Appennines to the Andes) and tells the story of a child who, all by himself, travels by sea and by land, searching for his mother (naturally!).
    As for colonial expansion, Italy’s determination to find riches on the African continent