Recensione:
`The book is both anecdotal and historical, passionate and detached... a sophisticated travel guide, and a quirky recipe book' --Financial Times
`Something like a fusion of Coleridge's "Table Talk" and Marinetti's "The Futurist Cookbook", peopled with eccentric film-makers, anorexic saints and wafer-making nuns. It is also in part a ramble around the city, and Winner is an entertaining guide - zestful and thoughtful in equal measure' --Guardian
'Quirky, funny and insightful' John Foot, TLS
'David Winner's flavourful book about the food of Rome travels far beyond recipes to offer an intellectual blow-out. Wittily blending art, history and religion with culinary lore, he shows how the Roman table has nourished the Eternal City's culture' --Metro
Winner, a British writer who has lived in Rome for the past decade, sorts out this jumble of ideas in a series of intriguing and lively essays, making it clear from the off that, while food plays a major role in Roman life, it is not his subject matter but a unifying theme. The result is something like a fusion of Coleridge's 'Table Talk' and Marinetti's 'The Futurist Cookbook', peopled with eccentric film-makers, anorexic saints and wafer-making nuns. --Observer
Intriguing... This eccentric salmagundi of a book is a delight, always entertaining and often revelatory. Winner convincingly demonstrates that the culture from which food emerges is far more interesting than dishes per se --Independent
Dalla seconda/terza di copertina:
A highly original interpretation of Rome's history, culture, art and religion takes the form of a book about food . . . that's not really about food at all!
Imagine the River Tiber as an alimentary tract. Picture a hungry saint. Think of erotic Renaissance fruit paintings, transubstantiation and a tiramisu café where magic is surely on the menu . . .
During his first two years in Rome, David Winner found himself by turn amazed and overwhelmed by its physical, historical and cultural vastness. Then a chance encounter with an extraordinary pudding provided him with the means to start digesting his surroundings. He was struck by the significance of the Roman attitude to food: a unique and unequivocal relationship between sustenance and existence, where every last aspect of life is (and always has been) 'pickled in alimentation'.
In Al Dente, Winner takes us on a stroll through the city. We learn about Rome as metropolis and necropolis, about tasty vineyard snails and the food-and-sex scandal that sent Saint Jerome packing. Film greats such as Fellini and Ferreri are discussed as entertainingly as history, satire and grocery orgies. Alongside the bloodthirsty antics of a nineteenth-century executioner who worked for the pope (and inspired a pizzeria) are stories of immolation, architecture and artichokes. A nun explains Eucharistic wafer manufacture. Horror maestro Dario Argento confesses his terror of cheese. There's even a nice old recipe for stewed head of lamb.
£14.99
(Author photo)
David Winner is the author of Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football (shortlisted for the William Hill prize) and Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football.
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