Lessons from a Fish Stew

You don’t have to loiter long in a bar in Italy in a small town or village to hear evidence of campanilismo. It’s part of the Italian nature to be convinced that the customs, food, landscape and architecture in the shadow of his or her campanile is best and, furthermore, that the people of the next town are stupid, stingy, lazy, rogues or worse. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in the case of cacciucco (pronounced catch-chooc-co). Cacciucco is a typical Mediterranean fish stew and is the cause of much playful, sometimes acrimonious, banter between the towns of Livorno and Viareggio, on the coast of Tuscany. As Emiliana Lucchesi puts it: ‘There is as much discussion about the “citizenship” of cacciucco as about the sex of angels’ (Cucina di Lucchesia e Versilia).

The one and only cacciucco alla livornese (photo: Associazione Cacciucco Livorno)

To find out much more about cacciucco, Italian customs and language read the whole blog at http://slowtraveltours.com/blog/lessons-from-a-fish-stew/