and now, the main event. so what he s doing now he says, this is, the secret fabio: the family secret. besides excessive amounts of salt. so the little sort of wisps of olive branch like this in the fire. so you re getting, you re getting the flavor of those olive branches. it gives it a very distinctive taste. during the renaissance the medici lit fires around the city on feast days and handed out
the food of rich cities and the poor countryside are the two great pillars of tuscan cuisine. but what unites them is a blast of fresh sea breeze blowing in from tuscany s fabulous coastline. i ve come 50 miles west of florence to the city of livorno. in the late 16th century, the medici family turned it into one of the great trading ports of italy, where tuscany welcomed the world. chef fabio picchi is never happier than when he s here, with friends, and the prospect of a good meal on the horizon. during the renaissance, migrants were actively encouraged to settle in livorno and its reputation as a free-thinking
he led the family at their dizzying height in the 1500s. in this fresco undergoing restoration, he s become so powerful he s being crowned grand-duke of tuscany by the pope himself he marries an extremely wealthy woman, the spanish princess eleanor de toledo. not only does she bring a lot of money but she brings a lot of the new spices from the new world. the chocolates, the coffee, everything that is the cuisine. that s when the tomato arrived? that s when it arrives more or less in that era then. which completely altered italian. completely. completely. .cuisine medici money cultivated this city, and the arts and the ideas that grew here in the renaissance changed how we all see the world. but this family also changed the way things taste. it may seem a long way from michelangelo to the greatest t-bone steak you ve ever eaten,
and some people needed to be more healthy than others. if you were pregnant you could have one at any time. you could have one at any time? yeah. if you were pregnant. yeah. because it was considered. my mother did that, no she didn t. really? yeah. like a nourishment. so, it s sort of the opposite of today? yeah, of today. okay. come on. let s go, come on. this could be a disappointingly short wine crawl as bar babae is currently the only functioning wine window in florence. even if there are still 130 or so defunct ones around the city. these little wine windows don t exist anywhere outside of tuscany, another example of renaissance genius. there are too many of them. yeah. and then, completely by chance, we come across another. but the sign would be from when? that sign.
festival this evening. a very fancy festival. the one thing that everybody has in common is the food. yeah. this event is about as far as you can get from the wheat threshing festival. here florence s richest and most powerful families have gathered, as they have for centuries, to toast the city s new creative talent from chefs and musicians, to artists hoping to follow in the footsteps of da vinci and michelangelo. you are right now in a situation where, more or less 500 years ago, the medici would have done something like this. so we re going to go and have some food now. she knows me too well. really? it s a very sophisticated form