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.

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.

Giovanna, a resident of Campania, explains how tomato puree is made, and then preserved in glass jars.

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.

Anna and Marika are having lunch in the Trastevere quarter of Rome. Join them as they order traditional Roman pasta dishes and talk about Italian eating habits.

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.

Who doesn't love ice cream? Andromeda gives us her take on the history of gelato (ice cream), from Mount Etna in Sicily to Paris.

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.

Andromeda talks about the various types of ice cream and how they are made.

"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.