Whenever he got exasperated by the antics of his skinny friend, Stan Laurel, his partner, Oliver Hardy, would sigh, “Oh, Stanley!”– which rather sums up my reaction to Stanley Tucci’s six-part CNN series, Searching for Italy. Now that’s it’s completed, some post-game analysis is due. 

As readers know, I found the show bland, even negligible. If I had to give it a grade, it was a passable “C.” But, why? In order to figure it out, I have to beg the readers’ indulgence and name-drop: I interviewed Tucci in 1996 when he was in Chicago promoting his film, Big Night. 

I was a cub reporter for Fra Noi, Chicagoland’s Italian American newspaper, and this was, in retrospect, the biggest interview of my career. Accompanied by a PR rep, who sat at a table behind us keeping track of time, Tucci couldn’t have been more pleasant and entertaining. Although I was new to italianitá, Tucci’s knowledge of Italy – and Calabria, where both his parents’ ancestors hailed – seemed impressive. Indeed, he was passionate about why he made Big Night (“Hollywood has robbed Italians of a lot in the movies”). He said he was even working on a script for another pro-Italian film, based on Filippo Marinetti and the Futurist movement in turn-of-the-century Italy.

(Note: He never did make that film – yet – but in 2017 he kinda/sorta came close by directing the film Final Portrait about the Italian-Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti.) 

Unlike Tucci, I never had the pleasure of living in Italy for an entire year, as he did as a pre-teen while his father took the entire family to live in Florence during a teaching sabbatical. The closest I came was renting an apartment in Florence in 1994 for three weeks, which I used as a home-base to take the trains to visit as many Italian cities as I could. To this day, I still can’t believe what I did: I visited 11 major cities, from Venice to Sorrento, in the space of three weeks. By the end of the trip, I was exhausted, yet exhilarated. Italy didn’t disappoint.  Still hasn’t.  I’ve been back 14 times.

That being said, there’s a difference between being a casual tourist and someone who actually “became” an honorary Italian, if only for a year. Tucci’s special, as the TV ads kept saying, was “a culinary journey,” meant to express something about “the people and culture of Italy.” But I got more of an impression of Italy and the Italian people during my quick “jump-on-the-trains” experience than I did while watching Tucci’s extended series – as did only one-time visitors to Italy.

A quick gauge was the reaction of my brother and sister, whom I finally talked into going to Italy with me back in 2018, now that they had the time and money. My brother kept asking, “Why is Tucci focusing on Third World influences in the food?” My sister remarked that the gypsies whom he profiled in his Naples episode weren’t as nice as the ones we experienced in Italy (she was nearly pick-pocketed). She also noted Tucci’s foray into politics: “He seems obsessed with immigration.” 

In short, these one-time visitors to Italy knew that Tucci (or his producers?) had agendas to push. 

It was obvious that food was the bait-and-switch. And who would protest? There were enough images of Italy itself – one of the most physically beautiful places on the planet – to soothe the most condescending Yuppie. Even the segments with actual Italians and their foodstuffs didn’t really say much about the people, other than reinforcing the perception of a friendly, likeable, ultimately shallow nation of bon vivants who seem to do nothing more than eat or be merry. 

(I call this the Roberto Benigni Syndrome, yet even he is far from the clown whom the American media loves; Benigni is a Dante lover who does highly acclaimed public readings of his work.)

In Tucci’s defense, the history and culture of Italy, as he occasionally admitted, is overwhelming. There’s only so much you can share in one-hour episodes. But why didn’t he do what, say, the travel host Kathy McCabe (half-Italian) did in her series Dreams of Italy in 2018 when she went to Florence? In one segment, she accompanied a worker up on a scaffold, perched right smack against the “campanile” of Brunelleschi’s famous tower, and assisted him as he cleaned this awe-inspiring symbol of Western culture. Tucci could have done the same, perhaps while eating a panino and sharing some details about both the worker himself and the church’s history. 

As for me, I still recall snippets from that 1994 trip to Italy:  the God-like view of Florence seen from above in the hill-town of Fiesole, a favorite haunt of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright; observing the nightly passegiatte (evening walks) in every Italian city (which is why Italians remain in good shape – they walk off their meals, they don’t click on the TV remote like Americans); the young Italian barrista, upon finding out I was American, wanting to try his English out on me with a sample phrase, “How the hell are you?”; the endless lemon grove trees in Sorrento, a sea of blinding yellow which reminded me of the famous Neapolitan song, “Torna a Surriento“; and visiting two middle-aged, female American transplants in Rome – one a tour guide who married a local, another an English teacher, and neither of them keen on ever returning to America (which they haven’t). 

Incidentally, via that last item: After the ladies and I ate lunch, the owner, whom they knew, “closed” the place so he could hold an informal birthday party for his 19-year old son. After he serenaded his namesake with a guitar song, both the son and the father broke down in tears (of joy) and hugged each other as if the son were leaving to go to war. Everyone applauded and also smiled through their tears. For the next two hours, the owner, his wife, their son, a few family friends, and we three Americans ate, drank, and sang Italian songs. As we left the restaurant, which the owner was preparing to reopen later that night, one of the women said to me, “A typical day in Rome.” 

If Mr. Tucci and his crew would put their agendas aside and be open to experiences like this, next year’s edition of Searching for Italy might truly provide some insight into a humanistic culture. -BDC