Hunger transforms the world and cooking transforms food: Italy’s foremost food historian describes the history of the West through tales of food and dining from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era.

Massimo Montanari writes with the verve of a novelist. His invites the readers not to listen to his scholarly voice, except as background music, but rather to experience events for themselves in real time by staying as close as possible to the protagonists and partaking of their material and mental world. The readers are invited directly on stage. The instruments of historical research (archive documents, literary texts and cookbooks) are transformed into stage sets capable of conjuring up real or probable events. The protagonists of these pages are princes and pastors, students and bishops, hermits and merchants, poets, artists, cooks, famous personages such as Charlemagne and St. Francis, Dante Alighieri and the crafty peasant Bertoldo.