europe to come here and to create new things and to experiment with science, with the arts, with food, with spices. so it was like you say a think tank. a think tank. or a taste tank. exactly. expert art restorer daniela murphy is sneaking me in for an audience with the most powerful medici of them all. where is he? he s right, right there. oh my. meet cosimo primo de medici. 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
hi, how are you? thank you so much. to end of the evening we head off for tuscany s favorite nightcap. the local dessert wine vin santo, the holy wine. it s called vin santo because when you drink it, a halo. a halo comes? a halo is on your head. anyway. tuscan tradition dictates you dip almond biscotti, known in italy as cantucci, in your vin santo. oh, angle, is that what it means? yeah. the result is a sweet, crunchy and heady delight. maybe too heady. anything that ends in tucci, i like. [laughs] that s the end of that episode. that s so funny. cantucci, right.
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. the little doors of paradise. paradise, yeah. hi, hi, there you are again.
tuscany s famous chianina cattle needed lots of land, that was hugely expensive to run. of course, the medici didn t need to worry about that. but why? 500 years later, thankfully you don t need to be a grand-duke to enjoy steaks this big, and fabio wants to cook for me tuscany s signature dish, the magnificent bistecca alla fiorentina. good. and in case lunch isn t looking worthy enough of, like, ten men, fabio picks out a little appetizer, yet another cut of meat. we head back to the deli fabio owns. thank you. oh, look at that,
after tasting this new version of panzanella, we made some enquiries and found the chef who created it. nerina martinelli and her team are just about to open nugolo, a brand-new restaurant that reimagines tuscany s rural food in the heart of the city. nerina: the idea around the menu and the dishes that we do is to take traditional dishes, traditional recipes and then add something new. all the team of the restaurant, we are all under 30 years old so we are all really young. these young chefs are seeing old tuscan dishes with new eyes. nerina: so, the panzanella foam is an example of a traditional tuscan dish. so, farmers. basically made with the simplest. exactly. .poorest ingredients. onion, tomato, bread, vinegar. cucumber, that s it. and normally we do it with old bread. tucci: with old bread. right. with old bread.