Tucci in Italy: Stanley Tucci’s new series discovers the feel-good food stories

There’s a word you’ll hear a lot in Tucci in Italy – “felice”.

Translated from Italian, it means “happy”, but to the ear, it sounds like the girl’s name Felicia, often appended to “Bye”, a reference from the movie Friday and popularised by the internet as a meme to smugly dismiss someone.

When felice comes up in Tucci in Italy, there is no snark, it’s completely earnest. The people who say it, casually in conversation, mean it. It’s not that they don’t have challenges, but they’re happy, grounded in their communities.

Tucci in Italy is a follow-up to actor, writer and gourmand Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy show. He’s changed networks, from CNN to National Geographic, but the constant is Tucci’s genuine love for food and the people who make it.

The intro voiceover at the start of each episode has Tucci intoning that how people cook, gather and eat reveals a lot about their culture, history and community, and it’s his mission to discover those stories. He’s a wonderful guide, innately curious, good-humoured and salivating.

One of those tales belongs to Davide, a young man from Castrovalva, a small hilltop village in Abruzzo. Castrovalva has a population only in the dozens, which Tucci explains as having never recovered from the economic hardships of World War II and then further diminished by its location and earthquakes.

It’s not an easy place to live, but Davide, returned there after years spent living in London and New York City.

“I came back here at the time when I’d started to feel more alone in the world than in this village of 15 inhabitants,” he tells Tucci in Italian. “I had to go to America to understand where my home is, I came back here and I learned to be happy.”

There’s that word again, felice. As they’re talking, Tucci is watching Davide prepare mutton stew with Montepulciano wine out in the open, with a fire lit beneath some rocks for a makeshift stove. It’s how the travelling shepherds of Abruzzo did it in the past during transumanza, the twice yearly migration of their flocks.

For Davide, making the stew allows him to maintain a connection to his grandfather, and he tears up speaking about him and the defining dish of his childhood.

Of course there are close-up shots of eye-popping crispy, Roman-style pizza or of wheels and wheels of Grana Padano, which is apparently the most consumed cheese in the world, and of trips to tucked-away sandwich shops.

You can get that in any food travelogue. It’s the people that make the difference, and for Tucci in Italy, the series has decided to seek out different stories that reflect not just Italy’s heritage but of its evolution.

There’s the Ethiopian injera platter served in a family dining room in the Trentino-Alto Adige episode, where new citizens meld with established ones during a Cooking Without Borders meal.

These are the moments of Tucci in Italy that shine brightest – quiet, raw and genuine. It’s the person-to-person bond, an understanding of a shared meal and all that it represents. It’s happiness.

Tucci in Italy is streaming on Disney+ with new episodes weekly