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culinary culture. Thousands of people sample rare dishes, like donkey meat or frogs, only on the occasion of these feasts. In 1991, seventy tons of frog’s legs were eaten at the festival of the Communist Party of Bologna. 8

Veneto and the City of Venice

    Just as Friulians celebrate the ritual of the
tajut
toward four or five in the afternoon (that is, they sit sipping wine, in the company of friends, in some bar or at a small sidewalk table), Venetians practice the particular habit
l’andar per ombre
, or “moving into the shade,” starting at eleven in the morning. This “moving” means slowly ambling from one bar to another, drinking a small glass of chilled Prosecco at each. Legend has it that the expression originated with itinerant wine vendors who moved untiringly with their stands in search of shelter from the blistering sun, following the cool shadow cast over the piazza by the bell tower of San Marco.

    Indolence, elegance, and gloom: these legendary traits of Venetian life, celebrated in British, American, and Russian poetry, are reflected in the city’s characteristic cuisine. It was here that the hideous
risotto al nero di sepia
, black risotto with cuttlefish ink, was invented, drowned in the very ink with which the cuttlefish, like squid, 1 tried to intimidate the fishermen who threatened their freedom. When the central bones of the cuttlefish are extracted during cleaning, care must be taken not to damage the ink sacs, which are set aside. The mollusks are then cut into strips, which are marinated in the usual mixture of garlic, olive oil, lemon, and white wine, while the risotto is prepared by pouring the inklike fluid from the sacs into it.
    The Venetians often cook dried cod, which in this city is called
baccalà
. They callit that as a matter of principle, out of love for its melodious sound, consciously committing a terminological error. In all of Italy, apart from Venice, salted soaked cod (properly called
baccalà
) is distinguished from salted dried cod, called
stoccafisso
(stock-fish). Consequently, the dried cod preferred by Venetian cuisine should be called
stoccafisso
. But the Venetians are obstinate: if they’ve decided on
baccalà
,
baccalà
it is.

    By Andrei Bourtsev
    The name for dried cod is one of those apparently trifling questions that is linked by an invisible thread to the Italian consciousness, linguistic and ethnographic-culinary. It was first in language, and later in cuisine, that the complicated process of constructing a national identity was determined at the time of the unification of Italy. One of the principal architects of this important effort was Pellegrino Artusi (1820–1911), a banker, amateur man of letters, and lover of fine food. Born in Forlimpopoli,Romagna, but an ardent champion of Italian unity, in 1891 he assembled a book of 790 recipes from the most diverse regions of the northern part of the country. At a time when the dialect of Tuscany had been affirmed as the literary language of the recently unified nation, the
romagnolo
Artusi wrote his collection in authentic Tuscan. Indeed, he had moved to Tuscany in 1851 in order to learn the language better, just as the Lombard Alessandro Manzoni had done in 1827, setting out for Florence to spend some time there to “rinse his clothes in the Arno” before publishing the revised edition of
I promessi sposi
(1840). The unitary language of the country was evolving; consequently, a survey of the common national cuisine was called for. Piero Camporesi writes in the introduction to Pellegrino Artusi’s collection:
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    Science in the Kitchen
, besides being that delicious recipe book that everyone knows, at least by name—a fixed reference point for the Italian culinary tradition, the perfect handbook for a flavorful and, at the same time, balanced, diet—also performed, in a discreet, covert, intangible way, the exceedingly civil task of joining and