Italian food is intensely regional. It's hard to study it for very long before realizing that it varies as much as the traditional dialects of Italy. Before the use of Italian became common (dating to post World War II when children learned it in compulsory state school for the first time), a Sicilian and a Neapolitan could not understand each other. As a result, Sicilian food and Neapolitan food are two completely different cuisines with distinctive flavors that happen to share some ingredients and reference points. As a child, I loved the pasta carbonara I had in Rome and the potato gnocchi in meat ragu at my Tuscan neighbor's house, not understanding that they were reflective of two very different regions with wildly different cuisines even if they both ate pasta and olive oil. Lardo, for example, is cured in marble vats along the Tuscan coast in the Carrera marble-producing Apuan Alps: Delicate and pure white, it is traditionally shaved over freshly grilled bread, the heat wilting the pork fat and releasing its herbed scents. In my far inland eastern nook of Tuscany it was not an ingredient ever used or heard of. Yet when I started exploring over the border in Umbria I discovered another form of lardo, cured and aged like prosciutto and pancetta and used as a cooking fat, something that gives Umbrian food a completely different flavor from Tuscan food, even if they are both eating farro and cavolo nero.

Over the twenty years that I have been cooking and constantly studying Italian food and its regional variations, I have watched French food stagnate and wither both as an international star and -- I dare say -- in France itself. Italian food has become one of the most popular foods in the world. We eat better and more "authentic" Italian food in more and more places all over, at the same time as we have more and more cheap knockoffs everywhere.

And yet even as Italian cooking grows in popularity it still can't seem to gain the respect that French food once had or that Nouvelle Spanish food has garnered. Many chefs I respect -- as well as gastronomic journalists -- seem puzzled about what Italian food is, almost as if it's an easy cuisine, a cop out that doesn't require rigorous thought or skill to produce. I would argue just the opposite, in fact, that to understand the skill and the restraint that go into producing Italian food requires as much learned technique as the mother sauces of French cuisine (some of which are Italian anyway).

In fact, it is much harder to understand and master Italian food because it is so regionally diverse. I have yet to see two people in the same village make something as basic as meat ragu the same way. Each will make a delicious ragu, one that everyone would certainly consider Italian, but they will be different, perhaps radically and perhaps only subtly. To understand the differences, and to choose which one wishes to continue with, is indeed as involved as mastering fine French cuisine.