When Stanley Tucci isn’t busy making hit movies like The Devil Wears Prada 2, he can often be found in Italy, the land of his forebears. His National Geographic series Tucci in Italy takes him up and down the peninsula exploring the country’s cuisine and culture. Last year the show earned two Emmy nominations and this year it’s back in contention for what could be a second helping.
Among Tucci’s destinations in the latest season are Le Marche along the Adriatic Coast.
“I love Le Marche… Really, really beautiful, beautiful area that has a great coastline,” Tucci said as he appeared at Deadline’s Contenders TV: Documentary + Unscripted event. “It’s a very eco-friendly region. And the food is amazing. The food is just this wonderful sort of cross between Florentine and Roman and Abruzzo. And it’s almost like the perfect region in a way.”
It’s off the beaten path too, and that’s an essential ingredient to the show – discovering places that aren’t pictured on the cover of every travel guide.
RELATED: Contenders TV Doc + Unscripted — Deadline’s Complete Coverage
“It’s more interesting that way. There’s no point in me rehashing what everybody knows, everybody’s seen a thousand times,” Tucci insisted. “There’s no significance to that. We want to be able to dig a little bit deeper into the culture, into the culinary culture, but also the culture of the city itself, or the place itself, or the people themselves.”
In Procida, one of the Phlegraean Islands off the coast of Naples, Tucci samples a lemon salad. Elsewhere, he tries a pasta infused with the flavor of the sea by cooking the spaghetti with stones plucked from the waters.
RELATED: Deadline Launches Its Contenders Television Streaming Site
“Extraordinary and delicious… I’d never heard of either of those things,” he said of the lemon salad and tidal pasta dishes. “And when somebody said, ‘There’s this guy who does the thing with the rocks,’ I was like, ‘That is fascinating. That I have to try,” because that is the ultimate dish of poverty, the cucina povera. And as he says in the show, ‘When we were kids, we used to go down and get the rocks and bring them up and we’d make spaghetti and it was delicious.’ But it’s that sort of Italian ingenuity and that Italian resourcefulness that has kept that country going for thousands of years.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.