Among the objects displayed at Turin’s Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano is a menu from the Hôtel de l’Europe in Sanremo, written in French, as fashionable restaurant menus were expected to be, but with tortellini among the dishes on offer. It belongs to a period when Italian cooking was beginning to find its own identity, although the language of respectable dining still owed a great deal to Paris.
The menu is part of A Tavola! Cucina, cibo e gusto nell’Italia del Risorgimento, an exhibition that opened on October 21 at Palazzo Carignano and follows Italian eating habits from the late eighteenth century to the First World War. Its curator, historian Ilaria Porciani, brought together cookbooks, menus, paintings and kitchen equipment to tell a story that goes considerably further than what people put on their plates.
