Stanley Tucci on Pizza History and “Searching for Italy”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Stanley, I need to ask you, because this is actually CNN’s first venture into this kind of programming since we lost our beloved Anthony Bourdain.

STANLEY TUCCI, ACTOR: Yes, I know.

AMANPOUR: And I want to know whether that weighed on you. What were you thinking of as you took this on?

TUCCI: I was thinking — and I knew Anthony a bit. And I loved his show. But this is a distinctly different show. To me, I had to be truthful to what I wanted to achieve, which was to really just focus on Italy and focus on the diversity of dishes in all of those regions. When people think of it Italy they think often that it is always sunny, people are eating pasta and everybody is happy all the time and they’re drinking wine and limoncello. Now, part of that is true, that is a part of Italy but that is hardly all of Italy. Italy is so incredibly diverse, simply because of where it’s situated geographically. If we think about it, it goes from the Alps all the way down to Lampedusa, which is 70 miles off the coast of Africa and where so many immigrants come in.

AMANPOUR: Well, Naples, the Naples/Amalfi Coast episode, obviously encapsulates all of that. The migrant story, the — you know, the different and diverse story of Italy, the pandemics of historical times. Talk to me about the deep-frying episode.

TUCCI: Yes, it’s the beginnings of pizza. And of course, pizza is — it was just one of the reasons I think we — one of the reasons we wanted to go to Naples is because it’s where pizza began. And pizza is probably the most loved food in the world. The thing that is so interesting is that people — pizza began with people frying dough in this incredibly poor overcrowded city with very unsanitary conditions. They started cooking dough in hot, hot oil. And maybe they put a little pepper on it or maybe a little meat on it or something, whatever they had. And this was a way of killing all the germs and still giving yourself something to sustain yourself.