Almost one year into the pandemic, Stanley Tucci’s new show on CNN, Searching for Italy, provides pleasant succor without wallowing too much in pastoral fantasies or good savage characterizations.

What can be better than enjoying a stroll in the creative, buzzing mess of Naples, especially after months of being cooped up in our apartments? That’s what actor and director Stanley Tucci is giving us the opportunity to do –although vicariously—in the new CCN show Searching for Italy, which premiered on Valentine’s day. Naples and the region of Campania are the focus of the first episode, although Tucci does not venture too far from the coast.

The show promises to take us on a tour of Italian regions. The administrative ones, which is an interesting choice due to the fact that food in Italy is much more local than that. Regions were established only in the 1970s, and have become central for Italians because they are in charge with important aspects of their everyday lives, including education and healthcare. Although regions do not help much to actually understand the complexities of food in Italy, they have become a way of making sense of it also for Italians, which makes one wonder what the long terms effect of this approach will be: would actually foodways shift to neatly fit in an administrative scheme?

Anyway, I digress… Tucci does introduce viewers not only to the sunny side of Neapolitan streets, but intentionally dabbles in their shadows. After all, this is a CNN show, and some level of reporting is expected. Tucci does it intentionally. In an interview, he states: “I think in America there are a lot of very specific ideas about what is ‘Italian,’ and one of the reasons I wanted to do [my new] show is to dispel some of those myths about what Italy is…

People imagine it’s always sunny and people are playing mandolins and eating pizza and chicken parmigiana — which isn’t even an Italian dish. Because my parents were so respectful of their heritage, that cultural identity was really important to me, and still is.” As somebody who worked for years as a food critic and, as the US correspondent for the Italian food and wine magazine Gambero Rosso and now as a food scholar, often finds himself in the position of translating Italian culture, I can understand Tucci’s frustration with stereotypes.

If on the one hand the show provides enough food porn to satisfy any very justifiable need for escapism, delighting the viewers with breathtaking landscapes, old women making traditional food, and younger chefs giving their own twist to it, on the other hand it does not refrain from looking into the social and economic issues of the area. Tucci sips coffee with the local head of police, who explains the city’s problem with the local organized crime, the camorra, but also its unique style of organized chaos and its deeply engrained generosity, exemplified in the tradition of the “caffe sospeso.” A “suspended coffee” is a coffee that a client pays for to allow anybody coming after them to enjoy coffee even when they could not afford it: a street-level paying forward scheme.

Tucci also goes to Scampia, an unfortunate social and architectural experiment from the 1960s, a place where large number of poor Neapolitans were transferred into modern but isolated building and soon became victims of the camorra. The area is still one of the most depressed in the city. Tucci visits a Romani camp and follows one of the women to a non-profit restaurant called Chikù where Romanis and Neapolitans not only cook their own specialties for the customers, but also come up with interesting hybrids. Showing this in the first episode is an effective way to clarify that traditions evolve, that Italy is increasingly becoming multicultural, and food is going to change accordingly.

That said, there is PLENTY of traditional food: from the old lady making pizza fritta (fried pizza stuffed with tomato sauce, provola cheese, and fried pork bits) in a small hole-in-the-wall to brick oven fired pizza, San Marzano tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, Ischia-style wild rabbit, spaghetti alle zucchine, and limoncello. Tucci also looks at renewed customs like making coffee in a cuccumella, a drip brewing contraption that I vaguely remember from childhood but that had been almost universally replaced by expresso machines in bars and cafés, and newer traditions such as delizia al limone in the Amalfi coast town of Minori, a lemon, custard, and whipped cream dessert, invented relatively recently, that has achieved some national notoriety. The back-and-forth between playing with viewers’ romantic expectations and showing reality comes through the whole show: sought-after San Marzano tomatoes can be grown right next to a highway, for instance.

Nevertheless, Tucci clearly revels in his role as insider. He has proved is interest in and knowledge of Italian food in the movie Big Night, which inaugurated the film food genre in the US in the late 1990s, and has published a couple of cookbooks. His Italian is good enough to communicate with the locals. He points out that he is revisiting places where he has already been, where people are familiar with him to the point of inviting him for a family lunch, the first one after the death of the patriarch. This is a trope of the genre: through him, viewers can fantasize about having an insider life, enjoying access to the most coveted restaurants, and being recognized. However, Tucci is also a smart guide who acknowledges he does not know everything and at times needs to rely on local experts guide: a professor that explains to him the history of the city and its uncomfortable relationship with death and its constants mementos, or a famous pizza maker that takes him to visit San Marzano fields and mozzarella di bufala production.

Most of the longer cooking segments happen either outdoors on patios and terraces, often taking advantage of the local preference for al fresco eating (the weather does help in that). At times, though, the set up feels slightly contrived, but it clearly gives better control to the producers, who can easily beautify the surroundings. Real, indoors kitchens are messy, hot and noisy, so we are allowed only a few glimpses.

Overall, as much as I tried to keep my media critic hat on, the show gave me some tear-up, get all verklempt moments. I do miss my family getting together, when we sit, eat, chat, and sip wine for a very, very long time. I also miss Naples, where I studied for a couple of years. And overall I miss traveling, seeing people and friends, exploring new places. From this point of view, almost one year into the pandemic, Searching for Italy provides pleasant succor without wallowing too much in pastoral fantasies or good savage characterizations. I am actually looking forward to next episodes…