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It’s important to understand that Italy’s long and varied culinary history deserves semesters of study. The overview in this section offers just enough info to whet your appetite for the history of Italian food and to enable you to appreciate just how diverse it is. Wheat and wine, for example, are two cornerstones of both ancient and modern Italian cuisine that originated in Mesopotamia, the area that is now modern-day Iran and Iraq. The Romans made the most significant contributions to the development and spread of viticulture, the study of grape cultivation, around the Mediterranean. Today, as a result, Italy is the largest producer of wine in the world. The Roman goddess of grain, Ceres, gave grains their common name today “cereal,” which in Italian are called cereali.

Most English-language history books begin discussing Italian history with ancient Rome. Prior to the Romans, however, there were native inhabitants and foreign powers in the various areas that now make up modern Italy. Each of those tribes, of which only some are mentioned here, already had laid the framework for the cuisine of their regions. The Lucani, for example, were from modern-day Basilicata, which is believed to be home to the first human settlements in Italy. Many of their agricultural practices, including animal husbandry and cheese-making traditions, are still being practiced today. Indigenous ingredients such as herbs, pulses, meat, seafood, and grains are still part of the daily diet in this region.

From the Celts in the extreme North, to the Etruscans in modern-day Tuscany and Lazio, the Samnites in what is now modern-day Abruzzo and Molise, the Apulians in Puglia, the Sicani in Sicily, the Umbrians in Umbria, some Carthaginians, in addition to the Greeks in Sicily, the Sardi in Sardinia, and the Itali and the Oenotri in my ancestral homeland of Calabria, even regional Italian cuisine has a multitude of ancient influence. The word Italy actually takes its name from the Itali tribe, and the word oenotria, or “land of trained vines,” was given to Calabria by the Greeks, who called the area’s inhabitants Oenotrians (vine cultivators). Calabrian wine, in fact, was so revered by the ancient Greeks that they served it during Olympic ceremonies in Greece.