Welcome to breathtakingly beautiful Basilicata with its mountains and sea, light and silence.

This segment features Melfi, a city at the base of Mount Vulture, where Frederick the Second of Swabia spent a number of years.

The Archeological Park of Venosa is the highlight of this segment. We see the building projects of Robert Guiscard, the Norman conqueror of southern Italy and Sicily.

The segment features Acerenza and its 11th century cathedral, which was built over pagan and Early Christian constructions.

The segment concentrates on the environs of Matera, its rugged beauty, and the sacred art and architecture that makes use of natural grottoes.

Pythagoras, after leaving Croton, brought his school of philosophy to Metapontum. This key city of Magna Graecia [Greater Greece] brings the series on Basilicata to a close.

When does an artist become an artist? Join Gualtiero Marchesi in his musings on art and the art of cooking in this new chapter.

In this segment, cooking is seen as an art form, starting with a white plate as the artist's canvas...

Some artists, including Gualtiero Marchesi, talk about the past: horse-drawn carts for delivering produce, artists exchanging news from abroad before the widespread use of telephones, tripe for breakfast, still-life paintings reflecting the food of the times and its preparation. There's even talk of the desire to eat paintings! Buon appetito!

Gualtiero Marchesi talks about the chef as an artist, and how different chefs can be recognized by their distinctive artistic styles. In defending the choice of simple, genuine food, he goes on to talk about the art of slicing, and how it used to be "performed" right in the dining room.

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? That's what they say--but to Gualtiero Marchesi, that's not necessarily so. Sometimes beautiful is beautiful, period. As we've seen in other segments, cooking as an art form is a topic that's close to this chef's heart.

Art critic Gillo Dorfles talks about Milan in the fifties, sixties and seventies, and how, thanks to the war and to fascism, it developed as it did. Gualtiero Marchesi talks about the high standards of his cuisine, and some of the personalities who frequented his restaurant.

Eugenio Medagliani, expert on the world of Italian cuisine, talks about the days when Gualtiero Marchesi wasn't yet very well known, but refused to make pasta dishes. He describes a trip they made together through the desert from L.A. to Las Vegas where Gualtiero started getting inspired about pasta.

Giovanni Ballarini talks about Paris being the capital of haute cuisine, and about the birth of bourgeois cuisine at the time of the French Revolution. Chef Mariasole Capodanno talks about her experiences, as a young girl, with real French cuisine and how even the presentation was so amazing. Neapolitan and Sicilian cooking came out of the work of chefs who had been employed during the reign of the Bourbons, especially in Naples and Sicily, where the chefs were called Monsù, or Monzù a corruption of the French, Monsieur.

Gualtiero Marchesi talks about his experiences in Paris, learning from the chefs there. Actually, he already knew much of what was taught to him, because he'd had chefs in his family who were well-versed in both every day and fancy fare. He, on the other hand, was looking for something new and different.