Italy is a place that has ignited literary inspiration in foreigners for thousands of years. Since the time of Homer, who set big portions of The Odyssey in what is today Calabria and Sicily, the narrative of the expatriate wandering through the landscape-, art-, and food-rich Italian countryside has developed into a classic form.

These expats’ adventures are romantic, or educational, or problematic—or all three, like in the case of Odysseus. The premise is so irresistible it pops up on every genre shelf, with its own gusto particolare (that is, special flavor). Fantasists, horror specialists, romance writers, memoirists, crime and true crime writers have all joined the ranks of the Poet in this regard, and—wisely—almost all of them use the opportunity to plump their stories up with plenty of drool-inducing food writing.