There was no ice. No cold sugary soda, no kids drinking milk, not even beer was chilled. Eggs and many foods were not refrigerated. These were the surprising impressions Stanley Tucci remembers from that formative year as a 13-year-old boy living in Florence, Italy, during his father’s teaching sabbatical. When he could, Tucci ate pizza and schiacciata, a Tuscan focaccia bread.

But mostly, he feasted on his mother’s expanding repertoire of American, Calabrian, and Florentine recipes. In the evening, his parents sent him across the street to buy wine from the grocer. “The guy had a huge cask with a spigot on it. From that, you’d bring your flask of wine, your fiasco, and that’s what my father would have with dinner,” he says. “You could just do it, because it was assumed you were giving it to your parents.”