The final episode of Stanley Tucci’s CNN series Searching for Italy ** took us to Liguria and showcased its “rugged environment,” evidenced by God-like drone shots of the “angularity of its landscapes.” The episode’s opening scene set the tone: Tucci walked, ever more laboriously, up a long flight of outdoor stairs to the top of Castello Brown in Portofino, the seaside town that is seen as the northern version of Amalfi. Indeed, the region of Liguria is known as the Italian Riviera, a stretch of coastline which borders Tuscany to the south and curves westward to the border of France. From his perch, Tucci had an eagle eye view of the sea, the only part of nature which, at least in this show, he praised continually, without reservation, though he did concede that Ligurians have pulled culinary miracles from their hard-to-cultivate hills.

(Incidentally, you may wonder why a castle in Italy is named “Brown.” Since Tucci and his writers either forgot to look it up or cut any reference to it, Castle Brown is named after Montague Yeats Brown, the English consul general in Genoa, the region’s capital city. Brown owned the property from 1867 to 1905 though it was originally built by the Genoese in the Middle Ages as a watchtower for invading armies.)

At the top, Tucci meets chef Carlo Cracco and then an Italian woman foraging herbs – Iva Lavagnino, a local farmer who assists him. Lavagnino is the sort of unforgettable character you meet in droves in Italy, and infrequently featured on Tucci’s show. She introduced her 83-year-old husband, fellow herb-gatherer Alberto, and said the secret to his good health is that he doesn’t drink or do drugs. Then she told Tucci her own age: “I am 42” (though she is also in her 80s). Cracco’s 25-year-old son Mattia, head chef at his restaurant, explained that Lavagnino is the type of person “who even moves ants out of the way” when foraging, which he then demonstrated physically in true Italian fashion. When asked why, Lavagnino said, “Because everything has a purpose.”

Italian humanism in a nutshell – or, at least, in a pestle full of pesto.

Ah, yes, the green stuff. Liguria is world-famous for its pesto, a green sauce derived from crushing basil plants and other ingredients (mostly olive oil and pine nuts) with a mortar and pestle. The word itself is derived from the verb pestare (“to crush”), though the various chefs in this episode whom we see making it do so with Italian flair, i.e., lovingly. Nowhere other than in Ireland is the color green so distinctively vibrant than in Liguria, where pesto is seen in everything from pasta dishes to street foods. Tucci tried to promote it, and Ligurian food, with his “humble-food-of-the-people” trope again but chef Cracco gently corrected him: “No, it is not cucina povera. It is cucina intelligente. Ligurians had to do the best with what they were given.”

Even Tucci had to agree.

Still, Tucci reverted to form when he met Roberto Panizzo, founder of the Pesto World Championship. After presenting Tucci with a “basil bouquet” (which is just what it sounds like), Panizzo led him into a series of greenhouses built over 200 years ago which put pesto-making on the map. Tucci admitted he was expecting to see verdant green fields of the green stuff being cultivated by outdoor workers. He seemed shocked – as most Americans are – that the Italians were so industrious so long ago. By the way, there were workers in the greenhouse, suspended over planks and gingerly gathering already cultivated basil plants. They appeared to be foreign workers (South Asian?). Surprisingly, given Tucci’s other thematic tic (immigration), he made no mention of this.

In a reversal of his usual itinerary, Tucci then made his way down from the countryside above to the city below: Genoa, where Panizzo made a meal of trenette al pesto for him at his restaurant, Il Genovese. Genova was also the home city of Columbus, yet he was never mentioned – a true oddity, since Tucci kept alluding to the city’s past fame as a powerful port city. He reserved his praise, predictably, for its humble fishermen. Power to the people, baby!

After sampling some local foccacia (‘fugassa’ in Ligurian dialect) in a working-class area of Genoa, Tucci and his guide, American transplant Laurel Evans, rounded the corner to Via Giuseppe Garibaldi and its renowned Strade Nuove.  Lined with a series of stunning homes and palaces designed to show off the city’s wealth, the Strade Nuove is an UNESCO World Heritage Site. We didn’t get to look inside any of them but Evans did note how Genoa’s nickname of “La Superba” was a perfect expression of the city’s leaders’ desire to impress. After a meal at The Cook, with its “startling 14th century interiors,” Tucci, stunned by the creativity of its fish dishes, admitted that he enjoyed both the working-class as well as the wealthy class aspects of “La Superba.”

The next segments involved outdoor meals. The first was in Taggia, where the Boeri family treated Tucci to a tour of their olive groves and a meal of rabbit doused with their finished product. And the second was in Corniglia, one of the five small villages which make up the Cinque Terre. After helping local fisherman Guido Galletti hoist his catches of the day to his combo home-and-restaurant, Tucci enjoyed fried anchovies along with Guido’s fresh fish, prepared by his chef-son Pietro. The episode ended with a rather truncated visit to La Spezia, where Tucci joined oyster fisherman on their daily routines.

A note about La Spezia: Tucci mentions that one stretch is called the “Gulf of Poets” but offers no explanation. It’s a fairly simple one: It was visited by, written about, and even inhabited by such famous writers as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, George Sand and (in Medieval times) Petrarch. And during much of the show, Tucci wears blue jeans. I kept waiting for an explanation or connection for that, too, but it never arrived. Again, simple: American Levi Strauss may have made them famous, but as Gary Arndt explained on his podcast, “Everything, Everywhere,” it was “in the 15th century that a heavy cloth came from Genoa, Italy, known as jean cloth. It was a cotton heavy fabric, sometimes woven with wool. It was developed for sailors to wear wet or dry and was also used to make sails. The word jean comes from the French word for Genoa, which is Genes.”

And it doesn’t take a leap that the cloth’s fabric, perhaps mixed with dye from India, was deep blue, a reflection (no pun intended) of the region’s waters.

The episode wrapped up with a literal montage of clips from the past two seasons – short clips of Tucci enjoying food with people from the various regions.

I began to feel a bit nostalgic until Tucci delivered his final voice-over line: “Italy as a singular, powerful entity is only to be found at the table.”

That dismissive word “only” was like a piece of chewed food stuck between one of my teeth. ONLY? Like many an American, Tucci has drunk the Kool-Aid: Italian culture is something you eat. Sculptures, landscapes, works of art, music, fashion, scientific achievements, and the people? Mere window dressing.

If Tucci were my waiter, I would seriously recalculate my final tip. – BDC

(**Nota bene: Liguria might have been the truly final episode: New execs at CNN are contemplating budget cuts, and Tucci’s show may be a casualty.)