Stanley Tucci on pasta, popes and his new food show Tucci In Italy

Stanley Tucci might be the most enviable man in Hollywood right now. Riding that papal high following the awards season success of Conclave, Tucci is once again swapping the glamour of Tinseltown for the culinary delights of Italy.

The six-part Tucci In Italy, set to stream on Disney+ later this month and air on National Geographic, is full of breathtaking landscapes and the sort of mouth-watering Italian meals to make you want to ditch your Domino's and lick your telly.

It’s Tucci’s second show focused on Italy’s food culture following CNN’s shock cancellation of ‘Searching for Italy’, and sees Tucci trying everything from Abruzzo’s wild seafood to a pine needle pesto among the Alps — as well as a few dishes that might raise the eyebrows of less adventurous diners.

We sat down for an exclusive audience with the Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning actor ahead of the show’s Disney+ debut to find out what makes Tucci in Italy such tasty viewing.

Warning: you are about to get very hungry...

A tour of traditions and taste

Shooting the culinary tour over six months from January 2024, Tucci wanted to “get off the beaten track and be able to, hopefully, explore things in a little more depth".

"First of all, you're focusing on the region, so what are the primary aspects of that region, and what are the things that we haven't covered in the other iteration of the show? But also, what are the things that other shows haven't covered?" says Tucci.

And Tucci and his team go to some beautiful locations: Tuscany, Lombardy, Trentino-Alto Adige, to name just the first stops on his itinerary. It’s an opportunity to explore not just the food of the regions, but the varying personalities and communities of the areas too, from Tuscan cowboys to the pioneers of a space age farm. Regional identity is a big theme of the show, explains Tucci.

“Italy wasn't a country, a united country, until 1861. Before that, it was a series of city states in essence. So it's a very young country. It's younger than America. But because Italy was invaded so often over millennia, the people in each region had to cling to each other. They clung to the family.”

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Centuries of war and conflict meant that, often, local and familial tradition was the only thing Italians could rely upon as invading forces carved up the landscape, and it’s something that’s persisted until today.

“This sense of identity and this sense of clinging to tradition came from poverty and from conquest,” he says.

“Traditions became very important, and it was the only thing that you could hold on to, when suddenly it’s, ‘Oh, now the French are in charge. Oh, now it's the Spanish. Oh no, it's the Normans. Oh no, it's the Arabs. Oh no, it's the Greeks’.

“That's why I think all of those traditions are preserved, because it was the only way to maintain a sense of self and to have a clear identity. And that identity became expressed in the food, because they were all very poor, and the only way you could sustain yourself was to figure out ways to make what little you had into something substantial and delicious.”

Dining across the divide

Tucci in Italy looks to break down some persistent stereotypes around Italian culture. The actor and documentarian hopes the show reveals “the complexity of Italy, that it isn't just sunny all the time, and everybody's eating pasta and pizza and dressed in fancy suits and playing mandolins, and then there's the Mafia.

“No. That’s a post war Hollywood version of Italy. It is incredibly complex, from its topography to its culture that has been influenced by dozens and dozens of other cultures.

“If you go from Trentino-Alto Adige to Sicily, it's like you're in a completely different country. And the food you're going to get is completely different.

"If you drive three to 600 miles in America, you're going to get the same fucking food you got in New York as you get in Chicago — with the exception of deep dish pizza! It's all the same, and that is a world that we have chosen to create for ourselves. Italy refuses to do that.”

The show also allowed Tucci to shine a light on some of the more complex topics faced by modern Italians, including LGBTQ+ rights and immigration arguments. “Some of them are [connected to] places that I've been to, or people that I've met, or stories that I thought were interesting,” Tucci explains.

“There's one episode coming up that's in Lombardy, and in that is a gay couple who have had a child through a surrogate and because of the sort of rather draconian laws now in Italy, that child is not allowed to be an Italian citizen.

“Italy puts such great importance on family and tradition, but particularly family, sort of saying ‘Oh, well, you can't, that's not the right family’. And you think that's medieval thinking. And I found it incredibly moving.

“But we tell all of these stories, whatever the story is, through the prism of food. The whole idea is to find interesting stories that relate directly to the region, that tell the story of the region, but that aren't too familiar.”

Though Tucci’s sojourns to the most beautiful corners of Italy may make you green with envy, it takes a lot of work to pull the show together.

“People say, when they see the show, ‘Oh it looks so fun, put me in your suitcase’,” jokes Tucci.

“But what I want people to understand is the amount of preparation and work that goes into this is enormous, yet the production team made it look easy. So I just wanted to thank everybody for that.”

Tripe-tastic

It’s not just logistical headaches the star has to deal with. The show takes Tucci to many different culinary locations — and that diversity of surroundings and cultures can include some challenging dishes, too.

“You want to make sure that you have a diversity of people in each episode, and a diversity of stories, obviously, and a diversity of cuisine," he explains.

“There's quite a bit of tripe, which I didn't realise until I watched it the other day. Yeah, I thought it was rather tripe heavy, an offal-y large amount.”

Perhaps the most out-there delicacy Tucci tries on his recent travels is Lampredotto, a traditional Florentine dish that’s made from abomasum — otherwise known as the fourth stomach of a cow — cooked with herbs and tomatoes. While it may turn off less refined palates, it was a surprise hit with Tucci.

“Lampredotto? Fucking delicious, as they say on Yelp or something! It’s incredible, and I was nervous, I was nervous to eat it. But it’s sweet and delicious. Ugly, but sweet. It's like fish. The Italians always say, ‘the uglier the fish, the more delicious it is’.”

Not that it’s all gourmet binge-eating. Tucci and team do taste-tests at every stop, but short of the show descending into a Mediterranean buffet, most dishes are sampled, rather than gorged on.

“When we’re making the show I'm eating, but I'm not eating,” Tucci laughs.

“Somebody gives me a plate. I'm not going to eat the whole thing, you know? If we're eating like, three different dishes like that it would be disgusting! The idea is to show different bits and pieces of what people make. You [can’t eat all that] because you couldn't function. But usually when we finish shooting a sequence, when the crew will break for lunch I'll go take a nap in the van, because, yeah, I'm out!”

And only the finest feasts make the final cut — if only to spare the feelings of some the less capable cooks on the tour. “It would be rude, you can't go like, ‘Oh, thank you for being on my show. I hate your food!’” he says.

Popes, plays and personal connections

When not uncovering the hidden supper secrets of Europe, Tucci’s a busy man — as an author he’s a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller (his latest book, What I Ate In One Year, came out last October), and he’s comfortable in the directorial seat both on stage and behind the camera.

“I like to do all those different things. I don't want to do just one thing. I think actors become actors because they don't want to be themselves. They want to be different people. But I didn't want to just do that. So then I started writing and directing.”

Ultimately, “it's about telling stories,” says Tucci.

“I want to tell stories in different ways. And as I get older, I find different ways of telling them. This is one way. Books are another way, directing is another way, acting is one way. And there are other ways to tell stories that I want to try in the next, hopefully, couple of decades, if I have that.

“I realise now that that's the way I want to spend my life, is telling stories in different ways.”

That’s without mentioning his star turn in Oscar-winning papal thriller Conclave — a film that felt eerily prescient given the recent election of a new head of the Catholic church. Did Tucci have an inside line on the historic moment?

“It was all very carefully orchestrated,” he jokes. “They do eat well, though, don't they, the Popes?

“It's weird. [Conclave] is timely, unfortunate, but timely. I keep getting asked to do these news calls that my publisher sends. I don’t have anything to say! It was pretend. This is real. I don't fucking know anything. I said my lines and then I went home!"

But rather than ambitions towards the most important seat in Rome, Tucci is more interested in eating and sharing its foodie delights through the new series, hoping that it unlocks in viewers the same passion he feels — not to mention an inquisitive interest in how what we eat gets to our table.

“Food is inextricably entwined with love, no question. And I think that we've gotten away from that, in contemporary society, says Tucci.

“We don't know where our food comes from, which is one of the reasons why there's so much food waste. Because it doesn't mean anything. It's a thing to fill us, but it's not a thing that is filling us in the right way.

“It's only filling our bellies. It's not filling our souls, it’s not filling our hearts. When people had to take food from A to Z, when you had to plant the food in a certain season and reap that food you didn't waste anything. But now we waste everything, because we don't have a connection to it, and the connection to food is the thing that I believe is one of the things that can really help us as people.

“It helps us connect to each other once we share it with each other, once we share the process of growing it and once we share the process of cooking it and eating it together, it's the greatest connector in the world. It breaks down all boundaries. It's beyond religion. It's beyond politics, it's beyond everything.”

Tucci In Italy streams exclusively on Disney+ on May 19th, and airs on National Geographic from May 21st at 8pm.

Main image credit: Disney+ / National Geographic

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