The ego of peoples is – although it seems senseless to imagine it – much more immeasurable than that of the individuals who compose them. At any time in human history, any people believes that they have reached their highest physical, mental and cultural expression and are deeply convinced that the worst is all concentrated in the past and there is nothing better than the present. This attitude involves deep fear and aversion to everything that comes from outside, be it a migrant, a technology, a way of being or food. In the era we are living in, we have also invented a single word that can define and connote in terms of concern anything that looks out from the outside: "ALIEN".

If fears and proclamations were followed (and had been followed over the millennia) by facts, we would be here eating only chicory and broccoli, sprinkling them with that fresh water that, by building monumental aqueducts, the Roman Empire had striven to bring practically everywhere. To understand the concept, it is enough to focus on the alien invasion that followed the discovery of the Americas and try to understand why that invasion did not give rise to any "resistance".

In the 15th century, Italy, dismembered into a multitude of states and statelets, most of which were in the service or under the domination of the great European powers, had no opportunity to participate, as a country, in the organization, development and consequent exploitation of the discovery of the New World.

We cannot say whether it was due to historical contingency, inability, nature, will, good or bad luck, but no Italian ship ever crossed the ocean, in those years, nor ever, with a load of armed soldiers ready to challenge the unknown, driven solely by the mirage of new riches and power.

Italy, understood as a geographical and ethnographic entity (to be able to identify the political one we will have to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century) at the end of the fifteenth century was, and remained in the centuries immediately following, outside the great political games of Europe, forced to act as a spectator to the events then underway. But a people rich in history and culture, matured over millennia at the center of a system of commercial and human exchanges, could not passively live this role of spectator.

Here, therefore, in every part of the peninsula, attitudes of interest are activated towards everything that comes from those distant lands just discovered, even if no one has yet fully understood where and how they are exactly.

Each for his part, politicians and scientists, peasants and writers, public administrators and prelates unleash their curiosity, all forced to work on fragmentary and confused news, for the most part mediated by political-military intermediaries accustomed, by opportunity and inveterate habit, more to obscure than to clarify.

And even those assimilated more quickly on our tables, such as corn, have had the honor of having been the object of study and a source of creativity for brilliant minds such as that of Raphael Sanzio and Arcimboldo.

Retracing the stories of the centuries that followed the discovery of the New World, the minimal, everyday ones, but also the official and learned ones, another aspect of our liveliness in passivity emerges. The new products, once accepted and included in the food cycle, do not stand next to the pre-existing ones, as happens in all other European countries, conquering from that moment on their own autonomous space, but are transformed and integrated by immediately creating "new" foods. This is the case of potatoes, which arrived in northern Italy in the wake of Napoleon's troops, which immediately turned into "gnocchi".

Or corn which, both in the kingdom of Naples, where it was introduced by the Spanish, and in the Veneto, where it arrived thanks to the resourcefulness of Venetian merchants, immediately changed its appearance into "polenta". Or even the tomato which, when it is finally accepted as a food, completely loses its external characteristics in cooking treatments, except for the color, and becomes a sauce and sauce, ready to marry, creating new fascinating recipes, with meats, fish, cured meats, vegetables, cheeses, olive oil and pasta.

Similar events also accompany other products of the New World, such as peppers and chillies, beans and green beans, pumpkins and zucchini, turkey and cocoa. And for all of them, the leap forward, the creative flicker, is determined by the encounter with those typically Italian raw materials that already constitute the scaffolding on which the daily diet of that period rests and that today represent the cornerstone of the "Mediterranean diet".

If the discovery of the New World marked a moment of radical change in every aspect of European society, economy and politics, a change in which the Italian populations were also radically involved, from the point of view of minute daily life, no country was revolutionized like Italy.

Two centuries after Christopher Columbus' famous first voyage, the scenario in which Italians moved every day had completely changed, from field crops to market stalls, to home preparations.

History books do not usually deal with these things, but it is no less important than the chronicle of wars and treaties, the observation that in a few years our own environment, both rural and urban, had changed, in colors, smells, flavors. And the diet of our populations had changed, and for the better, and with it our way of living, and perhaps even of thinking.

That renewal of Europe, flaunted by everyone looking mainly at the location of the armies and the state coffers, had materialized in Italy by critically accepting the apparently most insignificant novelties, a tuber, a fruit, a bird, uniting them with our daily historical heritage and from there creating a truly new way of being and doing, nourished and at the same time freed from the vestiges of the past and as much as ever projected into the future.

It may seem trivial and reductive, but the new Italy, that Italy that is often admired and envied all over the world, was born in the gardens that welcome the products of the New World and its cuisine, which today is evoked as a symbol and synthesis of many of our qualities, owes a great deal to the American lands and to them must address its deepest and most heartfelt thanks.
Far from alien foods...

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