Talking Italy

In a world of fake San Marzano tomatoes and olive oil that’s only 5% olive oil, what really defines quality? What are we paying for when we buy from small producers? And how much of what we believe about Italian food is simply wrong?

Beatrice Ughi has spent 25 years finding out – not bad for someone who couldn’t boil a pot of water, lived on SlimFast and spent 20 years auditing other people’s businesses. Born in Rome to a Neapolitan mother and a Florentine father, she grew up on her nanny’s toast and Kraft Singles while her parents’ dinner guests ate her mother’s cooking. Then, at the turn of the millennium, friends of friends asked her to launch an Italian food startup in New York. Two years later the investors pulled out, and she rebuilt it on her own as Gustiamo. It lost money for 15 years. Today its Bronx warehouse is a place of pilgrimage for American chefs, and in 2023 the Italian state knighted her for it.

In this episode, Beatrice talks to Isobel about materia prima, the raw ingredient and the substance behind every label. She explains what to look for on a bottle of olive oil and why food fraud is so attractive to the Mafia. She describes a long night on an anchovy boat off the Amalfi Coast with no bathroom on board, and how colatura drips through a filter made of fish bones. She also explains why she refuses to sell truffle oil or coloured pasta, and what happened when Billie Eilish discovered her pistachio spread.

What has Italy taught her? Beauty, which she believes might just save the world.

Host: Isobel Giles
Produced by Italy Segreta

Follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/talkingitalysegreta/
Discover more of Italy at https://italysegreta.com/

On a summer night in 1978, Mina finished her last song at Bussoladomani and never sang to a live audience again. Her 15-year-old son was in the crowd. It was the only time he ever saw her perform.

Since then, Massimiliano Pani has heard that voice thousands of times, just never from a seat in the audience. He was a scandal before he was born: the son of Italy’s biggest star and a stage actor who was still married to someone else, in a country where that could get a singer taken off the air. By 16 he had a single on a Mina album. By 24 he was running PDU, the label she founded so no record company could tell her what to sing. Today, from a studio in Lugano, he is the man who turns her ideas into records. Those records still reach number one, decades after she last appeared on television.

In this episode, Massimiliano talks to Isobel about voce, “voice,” and why the most famous one in Italy belongs to a woman who is just as much a brain. He explains how a mother who refuses to be seen stays a step ahead of 19-year-olds. He talks about why she wore a bodybuilder’s body and an alien’s face on her album covers, and how he ended up inside a hockey goalkeeper’s kit on one of them. He also describes why an arranger is a tailor, why music is like the sea, and what happens when his sons and their grandmother swap songs.

What has Italy taught him? That a country built from so many layers can’t be rushed. To understand Italy, you need patience.

Host: Isobel Giles
Produced by Italy Segreta

Follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/talkingitalysegreta/
Discover more of Italy at https://italysegreta.com/

It isn’t always pretty, it doesn’t end with menopause, and it can start with an onion. For Monica Stambrini, desire is everywhere – if you’re free enough to follow it.

Monica Stambrini was born in California in 1970 and raised in Italy by a romagnolo father with few taboos, who dipped her bread in red wine and took her to Bergman films. At 15, Fanny and Alexander made her want to direct. Her debut, Benzina, a lesbian love story, passed the censors with no age rating. Later, when Italian women’s response to Berlusconi seemed to be pushing them away from sex, she asked the women directors she knew to make porn. They all said yes. Their collective, Le Ragazze del Porno, produced Queen Kong, starring Valentina Nappi – the short Bertolucci kept on his desktop to shock bored dinner guests.

In this episode, Monica talks to Isobel about eroticismo, which for Italians can be found in the sun, a coffee or even an onion. She shares why sex was cut from Italian screens so violence could stay, why women grow up believing they must be pretty and clean to be desired, and why she refuses to accept that menopause marks the end of desire. What has Italy taught her? The pleasure of sitting at a table with friends.

Host: Isobel Giles

Produced by Italy Segreta

Follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/talkingitalysegreta/

Discover more of Italy at https://italysegreta.com/

Contains explicit language and adult themes.

Contemporary art in the cradle of the Renaissance? Everybody thought he was crazy.

Arturo Galansino is the director of one of Europe's most dynamic contemporary art museums, Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence. His first exhibition with Ai Weiwei became the most visited contemporary art exhibition ever held in Italy, and his recent Mark Rothko exhibition drew more than 300,000 visitors, the most in the palazzo’s history. A self-confessed country boy from Piedmont, he studied Caravaggio in Milan and spent more than a decade abroad at the Louvre, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy before coming home to Italy in 2015. When he isn’t curating, he’s show-jumping.

In this episode, Arturo talks to Isobel about dialogo, “dialogue,” and why a museum should be a conversation rather than a lecture. He shares the day hundreds of protesters came to the palazzo after a deadly fire, how Fra Angelico’s frescoes set Rothko on the path to abstraction, and his favourite farmyard expression for wasting time. What has Italy taught him? That history isn’t a burden. It makes your life better.

Host: Isobel Giles
Produced by Italy Segreta

Follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/talkingitalysegreta/
Discover more of Italy at https://italysegreta.com/

The secret to Italian style? Look like you didn’t try.

Scott Schuman is the photographer behind The Sartorialist. A sporty kid from Indiana, he discovered fashion flicking through GQ in a drugstore at 12, and fell for Milan through pictures of Giorgio Armani cycling to work in a suit. He wanted to be a designer, studied costume design and spent years in fashion showrooms, but didn’t pick up a camera seriously until his late 30s, when, as a stay-at-home dad, he started The Sartorialist. It took off almost immediately. Twenty years and six books later, he lives in the city that first caught his eye. His latest book, Milano, carries a foreword by Armani, the hero he was always careful never to get too close to.

In this episode, Scott talks to Isobel about sprezzatura, “something almost perfect and a little messed up,” and why the real thing can’t be faked. He shares the Sunday morning he leapt out of a taxi to photograph Armani, the street corner where Milan’s best-dressed cyclists fly past his lens, and why the Milanese would rather you didn’t sweat at the gym. What has Italy taught him? That you can have a small life and a beautiful one.

Host: Isobel Giles
Produced by Italy Segreta

Follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/talkingitalysegreta/
Discover more of Italy at https://italysegreta.com/

In every Italian cookbook, two small letters sit beside the salt, the flour and the olive oil: q.b. They might just be the secret to a happier life.

Amber Guinness grew up in a crumbling farmhouse outside Siena, where she was bathed as a baby in a frozen water barrel and learned to cook from a mother who never used scales. Her parents spent years bringing the house back to life, feeding the builders with long, improvised lunches along the way. After her father died, Amber, then 24 and entirely self-taught, decided to fill the house with people again. She co-founded the Arniano Painting School and found herself cooking for 15 people three times a day. Guests kept asking for the recipes, and these became three bestselling cookbooks: A House Party in Tuscany, Italian Coastal and Winter in Tuscany. She now lives in Florence with her husband, the journalist Matthew Bell, and their young son, Milo.

In this episode, Amber talks to Isobel about quanto basta, “just enough,” and why it’s a philosophy for life as much as for the kitchen. She shares stories of the local cook who looked at her as if she were mad for weighing flour, the four-year search for the perfect meatball recipe, and her three-year-old’s olive oil tasting at nursery. The one lesson Italy has taught her above all else? A stressful day should be punctuated with a good lunch out.

Host: Isobel Giles
Produced by Italy Segreta

Follow us on instagram https://www.instagram.com/talkingitalysegreta/
Discover more of Italy at italysegreta.com