[ speaking foreign language ] 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, look at the flowers. he hurries us past any food that hasn t had a pulse. and we head up to his hideaway on the roof, where he does his cooking. oh my god. come on.
water before cooking. oh really? and they taste so. you don t have to soak them beforehand? no, that s the difference. we h we say [ speaking foreign language ] it means the florentines eat the beans. the bean eaters. yeah, because we are using so many different oh no, now you re going to mix them all up. the cooking is really, very poor, simple cooking. that s true. i read that during the renaissance the wealthier people would have meat. whereas the poorer people basically just had beans, some kind of soup and some bread and that was it. i have to say, we use what we have. it says something about the character of the tuscany people. we have tuscan bread without salt. i know, i remember when i was a kid and we came here and we tasted the bread and i was like, this is terrible, this is the worst thing i ve ever had in my life.
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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.