Several episodes of the CNN series “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy” open with a message that’s part apology and part warning: “The following episode was filmed prior to the start of the covid-19 outbreak.” For the couch-bound viewer, any travel show is a portal to fantasy. But a show like this—airing in a time like this—is escapism of another order. Here there are olive trees and cow-dappled hills and the blue-green sea, sure, but also cheek-kiss greetings and crowded piazzas, tiny café tables and narrow alleyways. Tucci, the show’s host, wanders through Italy’s regions unmasked, unfettered, chatting amiably with cheesemakers and pizzaiolos, sipping aperitivos on rooftops, picking up petals of artichoke from a plate in a cramped restaurant kitchen. Everything, always, is drenched in heavy yellow sunlight, as if the nation were basking in the languor of eternal late afternoon.
“Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” which concluded its first season this past Sunday, is ostensibly educational. Each episode takes viewers on a tour of a specific region, and in each Tucci spends a bit of time with scholars and activists, discussing some aspect of the region’s history or politics or social strife. But mostly he eats, and talks about eating, and visits the farmers and producers and venders who provision his marvellous meals. Italy is beautiful. The food of Italy is beautiful. Not insignificantly, Stanley Tucci is beautiful, too. He strolls the narrow thoroughfares of Florence and Naples with the physical eloquence of a dancer, at once smoldering and restrained. He gazes at wheels of cheese and swirls of pasta as if the food must be seduced before it will consent to be devoured. The Tucci of “Searching for Italy” is a figure out of time: thick-framed glasses, white pants, a rich leather belt, a linen shirt tailored narrowly to the trapezoid of his torso, cuffs rolled just so, the hint of a bronzed and muscled forearm. He delivers sly jokes and engages in patter with shopkeepers in a mix of Italian and English. “This bread, it’s an aphrodisiac,” he says, standing outside a bakery in Bologna, and adds, “I’m all alone in a hotel; why would I want to do that?” His suave exterior shows cracks only in moments of sensory ecstasy. Taking a deep whiff of a split wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano, or letting the funk of a ribbon of prosciutto blossom on his tongue, he moans, he sighs, he murmurs. The whole thing verges on obscene: Tuccissimo.
