This original work, which covers the writings published by a number of Italian female authors over a period of nearly a century, is organised in the following four main chapters: ‘Fascism, Food, and the Senses’ (pp. 16–50), ‘World War II, Food, and Women’s Bodies’ (pp. 51–83), ‘The Politicization of the Everyday’ (pp. 84–118), and ‘The Third Millennium: Food as Relationships’ (pp. 119–146). An extensive bibliography concludes the study. The three main objectives of Sambuco’s book are ‘to construct an overview of women’s engagement with the domain of food in a variety of social frameworks’ (p. 148), to ‘use the theme of food and emotions to re-map women’s writing in the last century’ (p. 149), and finally to ‘present the narrativization of the body made possible by food writing’ (p. 150).

The book is dedicated to the memory of Adriana Di Girolamo, the author’s mother, and mothers, as we know, are fundamental figures as the source of nourishment and emotions. ‘The act of eating is a process that may trigger emotions as well as an understanding of the self’ (p. 9), says Nicola Perullo, a philosopher of aesthetics, and the idea of food as a means to rethink philosophy is central to contemporary scholarship.

In the opening chapter, ‘Fascism, Food, and the Senses’, the author focuses on the remarkable contribution of women to the food and emotions theme. In the 1930s a cookery book entitled Il talismano della felicità (The Talisman of Happiness) written by Ada Boni and largely inspired by classical French cookery, purported instead to be the essence of Italian culinary tradition. This was clearly in support of the Fascist policies which, ironically, frowned on any foreign influence. The food magazine La cucina italiana (Italian Cuisine). first published in Milan in 1929. also supported Fascist alimentary policies, as well as projecting the image of a ‘new woman’ with wider interests beyond simply those of the home. Other publications of the period dealt with problems such as feeding babies in Eritrea, at the time an Italian colony, and showed an obvious racist bias when dealing with black wet nurses.

The writings by women in wartime Italy, especially by those opposing the Fascist regime, are discussed in ‘World War II, Food, and Women’s Bodies’. One author in particular stands out: Giovanna Zangrandi (real name Alma Bevilacqua). During the partisan resistance, partly spent in the mountains in northern Italy, Zangrandi realised how important kitchens were for the exchange of feelings and emotions, and these conversations made her feel like a human being again.

‘The Politicization of the Everyday’ is an attempt to reconcile the theme of the book with the problems arising after the end of the war, but I feel that the author should have given more relevance to the Italian family in the 1950s, as some extraordinary changes and improvements in everyday life were brought about by the Marshall Plan. The chapter later focuses on the writings of Dacia Maraini who ‘acknowledged the importance of food-related imagination’ (p. 97) in her work ‘as a memory of the starvation endured as a child in a concentration camp in Japan’ (p. 97) where she was taken prisoner together with her family during the Second World War. The style of her poems collected in Mangiami pure (1978) has cannibalistic undertones, while her 1984 novel Il treno per Helsinki deals with more specific feminist themes of the 1970s as well as the ‘theorization of the symbolic of the Mother in the 1990s’ (p. 100). This is followed by a subsection entitled ‘The Food Scene’ which deals with a variety of cookery trends, ranging from vegetarianism and the Mediterranean diet to the success of Alice Waters with her Berkeley restaurant promoting the use of organic and locally grown produce. ‘In similar ways, in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, the political demands for society’s renovation generated changes in cooking and eating habits’ (p. 107), and in the early 1970s the Centro Macrobiotico Milanese (Milanese Macrobiotic Centre) was opened, advertising a new type of food consumption. The final section of Chapter 3 is dedicated to ‘The Feminist Kitchen: from Clara Sereni to Estia’, a Milanese anti-authoritarian group named after the Greek goddess of the hearth, Hestia. This part is particularly dense and revolves largely around the highly original autobiographical book by Clara Sereni, Casalinghitudine published in 1987, which is an illuminating survey of the relationship between food and emotions.

The concluding chapter entitled ‘The Third Millennium: Food as Relationships’ focuses on the ways in which food can represent the multiculturalism in Italian society, and on the controversial attitudes among narrow-minded politicians who use slogans such as ‘sì alla polenta, no al couscous’ (p. 121) without realising that couscous is the basis of the durum wheat pasta brought to Sicily by the Arabs in the tenth century. The analysis carried out by Patrizia Sambuco of the works of three female migrant writers is a scintillating representation of how food can speak more clearly than words as it represents a wide combination of feelings experienced by migrants. The short story ‘Salsicce’ by Igiaba Scego, originally from Somalia, is paradigmatic. Scego finds that her ‘bittersweet nostalgia’ (p. 136) can only be called with the Portuguese term saudade (incidentally misspelt twice, on p. 136 and 138), ‘una sorta di malinconia che si prova quando si è stati molto felici’ (p. 136) (a kind of melancholy that you feel when you have been very happy). ‘Literary food as a means to discuss the range of emotions around the migration experiences is more extensively elaborated by [Laila] Wadia’ (p. 134), a member of the Parsi community who moved from India to Trieste when she was in her twenties. Her work, published in Italian and in English, also takes into account the importance of nostalgia, considered in the past as a medical illness, but now regarded as an emotion dealing with the relationship between past and present, ‘psychologically significant to the migrant subject at the moment of adjusting themselves to new identities’ (p. 135). Wadia’s poetry collection Kitchensutra recreates the notion of a melting pot in Italian minestrone ‘where every ingredient/stays the same/yet shares’ (p. 139). The final section of the chapter, entitled ‘Laura Pariani and Transnational Care’ is devoted to Pariani’s works, with special attention given to one of her short stories, ‘Il colore del silenzio’, published in her 2003 collection L’uovo di Gertrudina (Gertrudina’s egg). It focuses on the enigmatic figure of a Piedmontese nun, Suor Assunta, who lives in Chile and in other faraway countries and this allows the author to analyse the relationship between different cultures from an unusual female point of view.

Food and Emotions in Italian Women’s Writing. A Reassessment is an intense work, written with passion, and I definitely agree with the statement that ‘food has represented an imaginary that women wanted and needed to negotiate, doing so, more often than not, on their own terms’ (p. 152). Not always an easy read, but, overall, a satisfying one. It could be used as a vademecum to cover the contribution of women writers to the longue durée of Italian literature, and as a companion to the contemporary multi-ethnic writing by women who, hopefully, will persuade the reading public that food speaks, but never in a racist fashion. The book has been awarded a Flaiano prize, for Italian Studies in Scotland.