Stanley Tucci Is Back in Italy. This Time He Is Getting Personal

This season promises a deeper, more personal journey. Tucci returns to five new regions: Naples and Campania, Sicily, Le Marche, Sardinia and Veneto, tracing the link between Italy's historical landscape and its culinary traditions, where the ritual of the shared meal remains, as the show has always argued, the ultimate expression of a people. In Italy, food is never just food, Tucci said. It's memory, identity and, sometimes, a full-blown argument. This season, we explore how the past continues to shape the present, one region and one extraordinary meal at a time. What to Expect In Campania, Tucci celebrates a once-forgotten vine grape that is making a quiet comeback in the hills above Naples. In Veneto, he wades into one of Italian gastronomy's most passionately contested disputes: the true origins of tiramisu, a question that has divided Treviso and Udine for decades and shows no sign of resolution. In Sardinia, the focus turns to the relationship between food and longevity, exploring why the island produces a disproportionate number of centenarians and what the table has to do with it. In Sicily, the episode traces how centuries of Arab, Norman, Spanish and Greek rule left their mark not just on the architecture but on the plate. The most unexpected stop may be Le Marche, a region along the Adriatic coast that international tourism has largely passed over. It is the kind of place that Italians know and foreigners consistently underestimate, which makes it precisely the right destination for a show that has always been more interested in authenticity than in obvious landmarks. The Show's History Tucci in Italy premiered on National Geographic on 18 May 2025 as a follow-up to Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which aired on CNN from 2021 to 2022. The first season of the new series achieved a 100 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is rarer than it sounds for a food and travel programme with genuine opinions. The formula has not changed significantly since the CNN days, and that is the point. Tucci arrives in a region, meets the people who make its food, eats with evident and unperformed pleasure, asks good questions, and lets Italy do most of the work. It is television that trusts its subject matter, which is a rarer quality than it should be. Why It Matters for Italy Shows of this kind have a measurable effect on the regions they feature. The Tucci effect on Italian tourism, documented after the first CNN series drove a spike in interest in the regions he visited, is now an established if informal phenomenon. Le Marche in particular may be about to have a moment, having spent years as one of Italy's most beautiful and least internationally recognised coastlines. For viewers in Rome and across Italy, the show is partly a mirror and partly a reminder. The ingredients, the arguments about food, the instinct to feed strangers as an act of welcome: these are things that Italians live inside every day and sometimes stop seeing. Tucci, watching it all with the affectionate attention of someone who chose this country rather than inherited it, has a way of making it visible again.