Think of Italy and you're likely to think of food first, and all the other beautiful things it offers second. Italian cuisine -- or some version of it -- has colonized the rest of the world so successfully that there are probably uncharted corners of the Amazon rainforest where you can sit down at a red-and-white checkered tablecloth and order up a plate of pasta and sauce.

 

There's a reason it's so good. Actually, there are hundreds of reasons scattered throughout the different regions Italy. But here are 30 of them.