Stanley Tucci and the Art of Eating Your Way Into a Place

On curiosity, food, and why the best travel always begins at the table

There are travellers who collect landmarks. And then there are travellers who collect people, plates, and the particular quality of light in a place at a certain time of day. Stanley Tucci is very firmly the second kind. And if you have ever watched him eat — really watched him, the way his whole face reorganises itself around the first bite of something extraordinary — you will understand

immediately why his company, even through a screen, feels like such a privilege.

Stanley Tucci

The actor, author and committed Italy enthusiast is back for a second season of Tucci in Italy on National Geographic, and if the first season made you want to book a flight, this one will make you want to stay considerably longer. His route this time takes him through five regions: Naples and Campania, Sicily, Le Marche, Sardinia and Veneto. Five distinct worlds within one country that share a language and almost nothing else — different landscapes, different histories, different relationships with the sea and the soil and the table.

Five different answers to the question that quietly drives the whole series:

What does this food tell us about the place it comes from?

It is, I think, the right question. And it is one that more travellers should be asking.

The Italy we haven't seen yet

Italy is one of those destinations that lives so vividly in the collective imagination that we can arrive already certain we know it. Rome. Florence. Venice. The Amalfi Coast. The gelato. The Colosseum at golden hour. None of that is wrong — but it is incomplete. It is the postcard version of a country that is far stranger, older, more varied and more generous than any postcard can hold.

What Tucci does, with remarkable consistency across both seasons, is look sideways. Into the regions that haven't been polished for international consumption. Into kitchens rather than restaurants. Into the faces of people who have been making the same dish for forty years and have never once considered it remarkable — because why would you? It has always been done this way. It will always be done this way. The recipe is not written down anywhere because it doesn't need to be.

In Le Marche, tucked along the Adriatic coast and largely undiscovered by mainstream tourism, he finds exactly that — culinary traditions and landscapes of quiet, unhurried beauty that feel like something the rest of Europe hasn't quite found yet. Rolling hills, Renaissance hilltop towns, an Adriatic coastline that doesn't announce itself. Food that is rooted and honest and entirely without pretension. It is the kind of place that rewards the traveller who is willing to go slightly further, ask slightly more, and resist the pull of the obvious.

In Sardinia, he turns his attention to longevity. The island is one of the world's recognised Blue Zones — places associated with extraordinary numbers of people living well into their nineties and beyond — and Tucci is curious about what the relationship between food, land, community and a long life actually looks like when it isn't a wellness trend packaged and sold, but simply a way of being that has existed for generations. The answer, as it so often is in Italy, comes back to the table. To shared meals. To food that hasn't been optimised, only inherited.

And in Veneto, he wades cheerfully into one of Italy's most passionately contested culinary debates: who actually invented tiramisu. He does not settle it. But watching him try — with his characteristic mix of genuine curiosity and barely contained amusement — is entirely worth your time.

Sicily. And why it will always have my heart.

And then there is Sicily.

I want to stay here a moment, because Sicily is not simply a destination I have visited. It is a place that did something to me — the way certain places do, when you arrive somewhere and feel, with a certainty you cannot entirely explain, that you have been here before in some way that has nothing to do with geography.

Ortigia — the ancient island heart of Syracuse, sitting just off Sicily's southeastern coast — is where I understood what people mean when they talk about a place that holds time differently. It is small enough to walk across in twenty minutes and large enough to lose an entire afternoon in. Baroque architecture in honey-coloured stone. Narrow streets that open without warning onto piazzas that have been gathering places for two and a half thousand years. A market where the fish comes straight from the water and the vendors negotiate with the particular theatrical confidence of people who know exactly what they have.

I ate at a table there that I have never forgotten. A simple place. A paper cloth. A carafe of local white wine that cost almost nothing and tasted like the sea. And a plate of pasta alle sarde — pasta with sardines, wild fennel, pine nuts and raisins — that managed to be simultaneously ancient and completely alive.

It is the dish I have spent years trying to recreate at home. It is the dish I think about when I think about what travel is actually for.

Because that meal didn't just feed me. It placed me. It connected me to the island's Arab-Norman history, to the fishermen who brought the sardines in that morning, to the wild fennel growing on the hillsides outside the city. It made me feel — for one long, unhurried Sicilian afternoon — that I belonged entirely to where I was.

Tucci visits Sicily this season and I watched that episode with the particular attention of someone who knows the light there, who has felt the weight of that ancient air. He finds what anyone who goes with open eyes and an empty stomach finds: that Sicily does not give itself up easily, but what it gives, it gives completely.

Food as the doorway

What strikes me most about Tucci's approach — and why his work resonates so deeply with what we believe at Able2Travel — is that he uses food as a form of access. Not access in the physical sense, though that matters enormously and is something we think about constantly, but access in the deeper sense: the ability to enter a place, to be received by it, to understand something true about it that no guidebook can give you.

A table does that. A shared meal does that. The moment someone hands you something they made themselves and watches your face as you taste it for the first time — that does it, every time.

Travel at its best is not about the distance you cover. It is about how far inside a place you manage to get. And in my experience — in Ortigia, in the markets of Palermo, at restaurant tables in places whose names I have since forgotten but whose flavours I have not — the kitchen is almost always the door.

Stanley Tucci knows this. It is why, across two seasons and ten regions of one of the world's most complicated and extraordinary countries, he keeps pulling up a chair.

So should you.

Tucci in Italy Season 2 is streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu. Five episodes. Five regions. Start with Sicily.

Watch on Disney+ →