Breaking Bread: The Filmic Foodscape of Postwar Italy(Culinaria)

About the Book

Italy is celebrated around the world for its cuisine: simple, rustic, and tasteful. Likewise, Italy's cinema has continuously garnered great acclaim. Yet, the history behind their food and the ways it has been treated in media is decidedly more complicated.
reveals both the progression and devolution of Italy's filmic foodscape from 1954 to 1973.
Following the diegesis of Italy's transition from hunger to abundance across these decades, as visceral needs morphed into other forms of desire, this book portrays how the anxieties surrounding food began as a light-hearted, comedic nostalgia, but later transitioned into fatalistic panic.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introducing the Filmic Foodscape of the Boom
1. Totò and the Continuity of Hunger
2. From Pizzaiola to Phenom: Sophia Loren, the Nexus of Networks
3. “Feels Like Home”: Elevation and Containment in the Patriarchal City
4. Crises and Revolutions in the Work of Pasolini
5. La grande abbuffata, or the Reawakening at the End of the World
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography & Filmography
Index

About the Author :
Earning her postgraduate degrees at Columbia University, Niki Kiviat currently serves on the World Language Faculty at Greenwich Country Day School, where she teaches Italian and Spanish.

Review :
“Not only a rigorous exploration of the cinematic foodscape of postwar Italy, but also an invitation to taste new scholarly food for thought. Highly recommended.” “Packed with fascinating detail, Breaking Bread takes the reader on a cinematic journey through Italy in the decades after World War II, a critical time for Italian consumers, who had to contend with scarcity, Americanization, and a fear of excess. By analysing the varied ways in which well-known actors and directors grappled with post-war scarcity and abundance, Kiviat offers a fresh approach to understanding contemporary Italian foodways. Seamlessly blending food studies and film studies, Breaking Bread reveals much about artistic production, popular attitudes, gender roles, and the profound impact of historical change on what and how Italians ate.” “Culinary traditions are central to Italian culture. Through the analysis of films ranging from comedy to drama, this volume examines how food reflected and partly contributed to the anxieties accompanying the epochal sociopolitical shifts that shaped Italy in the thirty years that followed World War II. As hunger gave way to unbridled consumption, representations of cooking and eating on the silver screen allowed audiences – together with stars, script writers, and filmmakers – to work through the ambivalences between the enthusiasm for the Economic Miracle and the nostalgia for the conviviality and the apparent innocence of the past.”