Terre d'acqua means water-lands. We are talking about the once marshy area which has now become the fertile Po valley. Gualtiero Marchesi is considered to be the founder of the new Italian cuisine, and is perhaps the best known Italian chef in the world. He begins telling us his story.

World famous chef, Gualtiero Marchesi talks about his career, his search for a total cuisine, an authentic cuisine.

Our famous chef talks about the town where he spent much of his childhood, San Zenone al Po, where two rivers meet, and where flooding has always been part of life.

Gualtiero Marchesi recalls his childhood, living along the banks of the River Po. His memories are as diverse as milking cows and seeing German bombers taking out bridges.

Gualtiero Marchesi recalls the early years of his friendship with Aldo Calvi, when the would hunt and fish together along the Po.

Pre-war and wartime cooking, when fuel for cooking was in short supply, made raw recipes come to the fore.

Water, earth, fish, animals, rice: these were the fundamental elements of Italian cuisine in the pre-war and war years, elements that profoundly influenced the culinary creations of one of the most famous chefs in Italy, Gualtiero Marchesi.

The video weaves together Marchesi recounting a story about his first love when he was twelve, and a critic discussing Artusi and Marchesi's debt to popular cuisine.

We learn how and when rice was introduced into Italy. It first appeared in the fourteen hundreds, brought to Lombardy from Spain; and to Sicily from the Arabic world.

One thing that has made Gualtiero Marchesi become such a great in modern Italian cuisine has been his ability to create new dishes by rearranging, in an innovative way, traditional dishes of every region of Italy, each different in taste and quality.

Into the fifties, many Italians would stop at trucker restaurants, knowing they'd eat huge portions for little money. With prosperity, Italians began to search for authentic and higher quality foods. One of Marchesi's signature dishes is the open tortello, a deconstructed filled pasta.

After the war, when eating had to do with survival, tastes started to change and to branch out towards different regions. Now, once again cucina tipica (traditional local cooking) or prodotti tipici (local products) have practically become magic words.

"Starvation gastronomy " describes the humble origins of Italian cuisine. Inventing recipes based on whatever was available in the territory resulted in regional dishes that have become famous today.

"Food is culture." What do we mean by this? Cultural historian, Massimo Montanari, and world-famous chef, Gualtiero Marchesi share their views.

As a fitting end to this journey into Italian gastronomy, Gualtiero Marchesi shares with us the recipe for one of his most special risottos, using his own innovative techniques while keeping with tradition.