{"id":15089,"date":"2026-05-12T06:10:29","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T06:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/15089\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T06:10:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T06:10:29","slug":"stanley-tucci-the-italian-hidden-gem-travellers-still-havent-heard-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/15089\/","title":{"rendered":"Stanley Tucci: The Italian hidden gem travellers still haven\u2019t heard of"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Italy\u2019s hotspots well and truly trodden by tourists, finding corners of the country that are still a mystery to travellers can seem rare. But according to actor Stanley Tucci, Le Marche should be on our radars.<\/p>\n

So far, the north-central region on the Adriatic coast, and its unique cuisine, has largely escaped international attention \u2013 so now may be the time to visit.<\/p>\n

The Academy Award nominee and Emmy and Golden Globe winner is back with the second instalment of his Disney+ and National Geographic show Tucci In Italy \u2013 visiting five new regions of the country and navigating its culinary past and present.<\/p>\n

\"StanleyStanley Tucci in Sicily during production of National Geographic\u2019s \u2018Tucci In Italy\u2019 series. (National Geographic\/Matt Holyoak\/PA)<\/p>\n

While the first series, which dropped in 2025, focussed on the likes of Tuscany and Lombardy, the second allowed Italian-American Tucci, whose family have roots in Calabria, to explore places he\u2019d never been to before.<\/p>\n

This time in the five-part show, the 65-year-old visits Naples and Campania, Veneto and the large islands of Sicily and Sardinia \u2013 as well as Le Marche \u2013 familiar to Italians but far less-known to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

Tucci touts it as \u201cone of the most beautiful and cultured regions of the country, with a cuisine to match, that even now is still ripe for discovery\u201d, in the show.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are places that you never thought existed [in Le Marche],\u201d says The Devil Wears Prada 2 star.<\/p>\n

\"Senigallia\u2019sSenigallia\u2019s beach, Le Marche (National Geographic\/PA)<\/p>\n

With 180km of coastline of beautifully clean beaches, dramatic mountains and Renaissance towns, the region offers a side of Italy where locals far outweigh tourists, and authenticity and preserving history is at its heart.<\/p>\n

Tucci visits the southern Le Marche town of Ascoli Piceno to discover their aperitivo culture, inland Macerata for an ancient recipe for layered pasta dish made with sweet wine, the coastal high-end area of Senigallia and the limestone cliff-flanked Conero Riveria for a unique type of hand-dived wild mussels called moscioli.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s exciting to be able to find a really simple dish of mussels, but those mussels are very specific, where they grow, how they\u2019re cultivated, the flavour of them and what they\u2019re what they\u2019re made with \u2013 I\u2019ve never had a dish like that before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ConeroConero Riviera, Le Marche (Alamy\/PA)<\/p>\n

Tucci visits a beachside restaurant called Da Emilia in the Bay of Portonovo, opened by the current owner\u2019s grandmother in 1929, and still serving her exact recipe of spaghetti with moscioli.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d been to that coast, but I\u2019d never gone to that little place where there were all these restaurants in a row, and where we found the woman who makes this dish that her grandmother made.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir grandmother was the first one to build a little restaurant there after the war, and that was like life-changing to me \u2013 as it was for that entire community, because they were very poor.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd, eventually, now La Marche is one of the wealthiest regions in Italy and one of the best looked after.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Emilia\u2019sEmilia\u2019s signature dish: spaghetti with moscioli, a local variety of mussels (National Geographic\/PA)<\/p>\n

The food of a country is often wrapped up in centuries old-stories, hand-me-down recipes and fascinating contextual history, and for Tucci, eating really is \u201cthe best way\u201d to learn about a destination.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Filming this series] just solidifies the fact that I love Italy so much and that I\u2019ll never stop being interested in that food. And through that food, for me, it\u2019s the best way for me to learn about that country.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear how much the country of his heritage means him. \u201cI just want to show the complexity of Italy and the diversity of it, because Italy is not a huge country, it\u2019s long and narrow and it sits like a sitting duck, in a weird way, surrounded by Eastern Europe, Greece, Africa and the Middle East.<\/p>\n

\"StanleyTucci also ventures beyond Rome to Lazio\u2019s less visited countryside (National Geographic\/Matt Holyoak\/PA)<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of those people, over thousands of years, invaded Italy, and gave what they created \u2013 what today is Italian cuisine.\u201d<\/p>\n

So while many people head to Italy to tuck into the famous pizza of Naples, pasta of Rome and the Fiorentina steak of Tuscany, for Tucci, \u201cThe most important thing is to show the diversity, to show the complexity of the culture through the food.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut also geographically,\u201d he adds. \u201cThe topography of Italy is so incredibly diverse, from Sicily to Trentino-Alto Adige, it\u2019s like two completely different countries, not only because of the invasions and the ever-changing borders, but because of the topography and the climate.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Veneto, Tucci wades into the culinary debate over the origins of tiramisu, while in Sardinia he looks into the relationship between food and longevity.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile in Campania, Tucci meets a Michelin-starred chef cooking \u2018spaghettino alle vongole fujute\u2019 \u2013 meaning \u2018runaway clams\u2019 (you can only taste the aroma \u2013 the clams are an illusion). It\u2019s a pasta with tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and parsley, cooked with his special ingredient \u2013 large rocks from the sea \u2013 served in the dish.<\/p>\n

\"StanleyTucci discovers unexpected delights in this wildest of regions, Abruzzo, one he\u2019s never visited before (National Geographic\/Matt Holyoak\/PA)<\/p>\n

\u201cNow you can\u2019t even conceive of such a thing, and yet, it\u2019s a dish that\u2019s been around probably for centuries,\u201d says the actor.<\/p>\n

If he could eat any pasta dish in Italy again it would be \u201cthat one\u201d, says Tucci. \u201cI swear it was incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n

All episodes of Tucci In Italy S2 stream May 12 on Disney+, with the series also premiering the same day at 8pm on National Geographic UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Italy\u2019s hotspots well and truly trodden by tourists, finding corners of the country that are still a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15090,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-15089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-italy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}