Has anyone ever traveled to Italy to go on a diet? Like every cartoon, the notion of the oft-romanticized country as the tourist’s pigging-out destination — it provided the “Eat” in Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” — has some basis in reality.

Still, the evocation of Italy as one gluttonous infinity of pasta, prosciutto, gorgonzola, gelato and bread lasciviously dunked in saucers of olive oil overlooks two interrelated facts. First, Italians have an enviably low adult obesity rate (10 percent, compared with 34 percent of Americans). Second, even the most landlocked villages in Italy are less than 300 miles from a shore, and thus from a bounty of frutti di mare, or fruit of the sea.