Mario Aprile, president of the Trifolao Association in Piedmont, gives us some tips about the characteristics of white truffles: their growth, the ideal way of storing them and of course some excellent recipes.

Raffaele, a producer of extra virgin olive oil from Apulia, tells us about the ancient origins of his olive groves. Many of the trees are centuries old, some are even over a thousand years old, and continue to produce excellent oil.

Pizzeria Brandi is an historic pizzeria in Naples, dating back to the seventeen seventies. Pizza Margherita, named after the Savoy queen Margherita, was invented at the pizzeria in the eighteen eighties.

Agata and Catena have stopped at the Catania outdoor market to do some food shopping. Catena gets to taste some of the delicious local specialties.

Catena and Agata relax in the garden of Agata's baglio [Sicilian architectural form with buildings arranged around a courtyard]. They're getting ready to cook typical Sicilian dishes that Catena will include in a cookbook she's writing.

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.