The Politics of Pasta: The Italian Cookbook in History from the Renaissance to the Avant-garde

NYU Florence - LA PIETRA DIALOGUES

A Dialogue with DANIELLE CALLEGARI
Ph.D., New York University, Visiting Researcher
Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

Danielle Callegari’s talk will trace the history of the Italian Cookbook from the Renaissance recipe collection to La cucina futurista, hailed as a radical and provocative avant-garde experiment when it was published in 1932, revealing the Italian cookbook to be not just a communicator of food culture, but also a path to fame and fortune, and even a tool for wielding political power.

Danielle Callegari (Ph.D., New York University) is Visiting Researcher at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa during the 2015-2016 academic year. Her research focuses primarily on Italian literature and the history of food and foodways. In addition to articles on Dante and medieval food history, early modern nuns, and the Futurist cookbook, she has recently published a co-translation of the works of Diodata Malvasia, Writings on the Sisters of San Luca and their Miraculous Madonna (Iter, Toronto, 2015), and a coedited collection of essays by John Freccero, In Dante’s Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition. She is currently completing a monograph on the social history of food in the works of Dante, At Dante’s Table: Food and Society in Late Medieval Italy