From The Australian newspaper’s Travel + Luxury magazine.

April 13 2024

Stanley Tucci has a lot to answer for. While he didn’t exactly discover Italy, I have a theory that over the last couple of years he’s put it on a lot of peoples’ maps. And bucket lists. So during a recent visit to Florence, I decided to put that theory to the test…

 Early in the Tuscany episode of Stanley Tucci’s extremely luscious and engaging travel series, ‘Searching for Italy’, he enjoys a glass of wine on the sunny roof terrace of an organic grocery store called C.Bio. While he drinks, Fabio Picchi, a “renowned chef who looks like he’s fallen out of a Renaissance painting” (as Tucci describes him), cooks them both classic Florentine bistecca, which is showered in salt. The extremely bearded and charismatic Picchi explains that the quality of the sea salt is key to a great bistecca fiorentina, then adds leafy olive branches to the coals to give the beef even greater flavor. When it’s done, the meat looks incredible - perfectly black and crisp on the outside; fleshy and plum-coloured in the middle. Chef Picchi certainly knows what he’s doing: at its peak, his local business empire boasted several restaurants, a theater, a cooking school, and the aforementioned organic grocery store. When you’re watching this scene it’s almost impossible not to want to be there, with them, doing that. And I feel sure that it’s this kind of irresistible yearning that has sent waves of Tucci-inspired visitors to Italy. Me included.

So it’s this store – C.Bio, in the tight-knit Sant’Ambrogio neighborhood – that is my first stop in my search for Stanley Tucci’s Florence. From the city centre, I head west along a skinny, cobblestoned street on which I pass tiny churches, sprawling tour groups, sprawling student groups, sprawling luggage-dragging groups. I pass a row of harshly-lit enotecas, osterias, trattorias and ristorantes, every one of which I want to eat in and eat everything in. I pass dozens of stores that sell leather in all its forms: jacket; handbag; shoe; boot, purse; wallet; glove. Even more than anything you might inhale and swoon over at Santa Maria Novella, the exquisite parfumerie that is synonymous with the city (and which, inexplicably, Stanley Tucci did not visit in his search for here), leather is the signature scent of Florence. That’s because the Arno river, which divides the city, provides an endless supply of water required for the tanning process, so Florence has been a popular source of high quality leather since the late 13th century.

 I enter C.Bio macelleria and at first glance it doesn't look like there are too many other ‘Searching for Italy’ fans here. (Although a second glance reveals that there is a shopper who looks uncannily like Stanley Tucci himself; he is paying for some bread, and removes his wallet from a Gucci over-the-shoulder man bag, made of leather of course.) At the rear of the shop is a stairway that leads upstairs to the roof terrace where Mr Picchi cooked Mr Tucci that incredible bistecca. I go up and take a look around; it's late October, and very nice but would be a whole lot nicer if there was some salty barbecued beef going on. But never mind. 

Back downstairs I talk to C.Bio's manager, Annalisa Corti, a small, dark-eyed woman in her late-30s. I ask if there's been an appreciable difference in business since the Tucci segment featuring the store aired in early 2021. She brightens as soon as I mention his name. “A lot of our customers come here because of him,” she says. Great! I think. Theory on more solid foundation. 

Since I’m not going to run into Mr Tucci any time soon (probably ever), I ask Annalisa if perhaps Mr Picchi is around and available for a quick chat. It would be great, I reason, to get his thoughts and insights on how much his friend Stanley has changed things around here.

“Mr Picchi is dead since two years ago,” she tells me.

“Oh,” I say, then offer my condolences. I’m a bit shocked and saddened; he looks so full of life and energy in the show…

From C.Bio it’s just a minute’s walk to the Mercato Sant’Ambrogio. This is the city’s oldest market, established in 1873, and it is far smaller and less crowded than the central market near the duomo. And it’s here at Sant’Ambrogio that Stanley and the late Fabio selected that piece of beef that launched a thousand voyages to Florence. The market is a wonderland of culinary opportunities, both to take back to your kitchen and to eat right away. Since I’m just visiting I go for an incredible pannini with thinly-sliced local mortadella, gleaming stracciatella and three buckets of olive oil. It’s made by Stefano, an exuberant, patient and friendly fellow who maintains poise and charm amidst the chaos of his very busy deli, Enogastronomia da Stefano. It’s not yet midday as I take a stool but even so I am practically force-fed samples of pecorino and red wine by Stefano, who seems to want everybody at his store to have a little taste of everyting in his store. I’m not really a day-drinker (and certainly not a morning drinker) but it would be uncharitable to resist his generosity and enthusiasm. Besides, Il Tucci has a glass of wine in hand in pretty much every scene of his series, no matter the location or time of day. Saluti!

 I’m not sure where Stanley stayed when he was in Florence searching for Italy but if he wanted a vivid taste of history it should have been the Four Seasons. Located just a short stroll away from the bustling city centre, the main property is in a former 15th century palazzo. Befitting centuries of Florentine wealth, rooms are extremely large and lavishly-appointed. I have no doubt that Stanley Tucci would be very happy in one, especially if it overlooked the enormous garden which, at 4.5 extremely lush and green hectares, is one of the largest private parks in Florence. There is even a small chapel in the lobby, with a majestically vaulted and frescoed ceiling. This chapel made the property highly attractive to the Medici family – and when the Medici family wanted something they took it. So it was with this palazzo. They took it and they made a small hole in the chapel’s fresco through which they watched and listened to people giving confession in there, so they could use their sins and secrets and shames against them.

As I survey the incredible foyer I see a woman having her portrait painted in the capella. She is sitting cross-legged on an embroidered chair, being quite loud and demanding – bordering on threatening – about exactly what she wants from the artist. She is speaking English but even so I wonder if she’s a distant relative of the Medicis.

 As night falls, I embark on a Stanley Tucci double feature. The first stop is the wine window at a bistro called Babae on a skinny, winding street in Santo Spirito on the southern side of the Arno River. The wine windows of Florence are tiny archways – around 30cm x 15cm – set into the walls of private buildings throughout the city. In Italian they’re called buchette del vino or ‘little wine doors’; how the doors became known as windows in English is a mystery. There are around 150 of them but only a handful are operational. They were created to avoid two often objectionable things: taxes and people. The windows first appeared during the Bubonic plague years, when they were used to sell wine while avoiding human contact. They also allowed their wine-selling owners to evade city taxes, because importing wine into Florence for use in private homes was exempt from such tarriffs, but using the wine in a store was not. Unsurprisingly, wine windows enjoyed a resurgence in 2020 during our most recent plague years, and then another resurgence in subsequent years thanks to you-know-who.

 Because the place has been sanctified by St Stanley, there’s a small crowd gathered in the narrow, quaint street when I arrive around six on a balmy Sunday evening. There’s a chalkboard near the window with instructions written on it. But I don’t need any chalkboard to tell me how this deal works; I’ve watched Stanley do it dozens of times. I approach the window and ring the bell that hangs inside, just like he does in the series.

Stanley orders in Italian; Sean orders in English.

Stanley receives a glass of white wine. Sean receives his – a short pour of very average vermentino – in a plastic cup.

Stan sips and reacts with a genuinely delighted, “Oh, that’s good.” Sean sips and reacts with a justifiably disappointed, “Oh, that’s warm.”

Sean pays eight euros ($13.40!); Stanley – at least on camera – pays nothing.

 A few minutes’ walk up the same quaint street full of antique stores, artist’s ateliers and paper stores, is Osteria Del Cinghiale Bianco, one of Sr. Tucci’s “favourite restaurants in Florence”. There’s a long line out the front but I’m not worried about getting a table because the excellent head concierge at the Four Seasons has secured me a booking. The restaurant, located on the ground floor of a 13-century tower, is a series of small rooms densely packed with very excited and very voluble non-locals. The wall next to my table is festooned with hundreds of small cards, each of which has a line drawing of a wild boar (or cinghiale) printed on it, and a blank space for people to share their thoughts, feelings and emotions about the osteria. The feelings are uniformly good.

 The restaurant specializes in what Tucci calls “poor food” (as in food for the poor, not low quality, I hasten to point out). Fittingly for someone of his stature and curiosity, Tucci receives a lot of attention from the restaurant’s gregarious owner, Marco Masselli. As do I, happily. I have already ordered a couple of wild boar-based dishes (because in a restaurant named after wild boar, I feel it’s what one should do) but Marco keeps bringing me other dishes that “you must try”. In between mouthfuls of hearty ribolita, pappa al pomodoro and want is in Marco’s opinion the queen of Italian dishes, panzanella, I ask him about the Tucci Effect on his establishment.

 “When they filmed it I had no idea what the effect would be,” he says. “But because it came out during COVID I thought I would lose a good part of that advertisement. But I was wrong. The fact that people were watching the show during COVID made it even bigger. So when the Americans started to travel again they came here.” He raises his voice above the diner din. Some tiramisu magically appears before me. “We were busy before but the show made it crazy. And I realised that because most of the customers want what Signor Tucci had so they ordered the ribolita, the tomato and bread soup. And the panzanella. Not everybody knew what all that was before. The Stanley Tucci Effect was huge!” Marco removes one of the small brown cards from the wall behind me. “See it for yourself.”  It reads ‘We followed Stanley T. & didn’t regret it!!’

I couldn’t have put it better myself.