Italy's FINEST

FROM FRESHLY PRESSED OLIVE OIL ON TOASTED TUSCAN BREAD TO PILLOW Y PASTA TOPPED WITH THE BEST PARMESAN, OUR CHEFS AND WRITERS DISH UP SEVEN SERVINGS OF ITALIAN CUISINE

- SARAH BARRELL

A bowl of yolk-yellow tortellini filled with pork and parmesan, bobbing in broth, eaten in a Bologna trattoria. A cricket ball-sized arancina, whose rice-ragu proportions seem to defy physics, bought from a Palermo rosticceria and eaten leaning against a wall. Tomatoes from a roadside stall in Puglia and eaten with bread for a car-bonnet picnic. The flavours of Italy’s regions are varied and, above all, delicious.

It’s a dramatic boot, Italy, standing thigh-high in four seas — the Ligurian, Tyrrhenian, Adriatic and Ionian — with an Alpine top and a southernmost point that shares a strait with Tunisia. And within the peninsula lies incredible diversity in landscapes, vegetation and climatic zones. What’s more, there’s the momentous shapeshifting that’s occurred historically, not only under the Roman Empire, but thanks to the kaleidoscope of influences — Austro-Hungarian, French and Slavic in the north; Greek, Spanish and Arab in the south — that have resulted in a patchwork of duchies, kingdoms, republics and papal and city states, each with its own history, laws, language, patriotism and traditions (particularly edible ones).

Unification happened relatively recently. Italy became a kingdom in 1861 and a republic in 1947, at which point it was divided into administrative regions, finally settling at 20 in 1963. These regions have many layers of identity, including, of course, gastronomic. And fittingly, pasta is perhaps the best embodiment of the country today: a singular entity that can be subdivided into hundreds of varieties, each with its own history and heritage.