Mangia: This Book Is A Food Lover’s Guide To Italy
Mangia: How To Eat Your Way Through Italy (Smith Street Books 2025) is award-winning food and travel journalist Maria Pasquale’s latest deep dive into Italian food and culture.
Pasquale, born to Italian parents in Melbourne, Australia, has created an essential guide for anyone traveling to one or more of Italy’s 20 regions. It reflects her passion for food, sense of adventure, and wealth of experiences living and traveling in Italy.
She has authored three other books (including one of my favorites, How to Be Italian: A Field Guide to Italian Life and Culture), and explains that culinary experiences are transcendent, offering a unique window into history, culture and heritage.
“While art galleries and archaeological sites may dominate Italian itineraries, I’ll bet that long after your trip is over, you won’t recall the height of the Pantheon or the year Florence’s Duomo was built,” she writes.
“But by gosh you will remember how you felt biting into your first ever pizza in Naples, licking ricotta off your fingers after devouring a connolo in Sicily, the saltiness of the guanciale in that Roman carbonara you never wanted to end and the experience of devouring cicchetti sitting on the Venetian’s lagoon’s edge,” she adds.
A Peek Inside Mangia: How to Eat Your Way Through Italy
One of the riches of Italian cuisine is its variety.
Italy offers ingredients sourced from its diverse landscapes and the sea. The Italian diet also changes with the seasons, ensuring dishes rely on fresh, local, high-quality ingredients. So foods, recipes, and culinary traditions vary from region to region and from kitchen to kitchen.
The book is organized with a separate chapter for each region (often divided more finely into provinces and cities), aptly capturing the heterogeneity of the Italian plate and palate.
The author describes each area’s geography, history, culture, specialty food products and dishes, food markets and festivals, and unique culinary experiences (e.g., truffle hunting in Piedmont, foraging in Umbria, visiting an osmiza [pop-up tavern] in the Trieste area, visiting Liguria’s historic greenhouses, and cheesemaking in Molise).
The lists of the top ten dishes in each region offer a roadmap of what to order where. Information about wines, which also have deeply-rooted regional identities interwoven with culture, provides readers with advice for pairing foods with local wines.
At the end of each chapter are complete recipes associated with the region that will appeal to home cooks who want to recreate a taste of Italy at home.
Before You Leave for Italy
The book’s layout is appealing, with interesting maps and photos. My one disappointment is that although it is printed on beautiful stock, it weighs 2.5 pounds, and the small print is likely to be challenging for most readers over 40 (a trend becoming all too common among cost-conscious publishers).
You definitely won’t want to bring a copy of Mangia on your trip, but it is an essential read before you go.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting (first written in 1958) became an unofficial bible for expectant parents (read by 93% of women who read a pregnancy guide) because it is informative, easy to read, and filled with practical advice.
Similarly, Mangia provides easy-to-digest information and seasoned tips on Italian etiquette, food rules, dining tips, and traditions that will prepare any first-time culinary traveler to Italy and enhance the experience of repeat visitors.
Mangia: How to Eat Your Way through Italy is available on Amazon.
Disclosure: This post includes an affiliate link. If you purchase through this link, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.
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