As you know, I find popular culture to be an excellent lens through which to understand a place; seemingly innocuous, it is in fact quite powerful, as both a reflection of and an influence upon a population. The program, Cuochi d’Italia, is a great example of this, and to talk about it I want to first talk about some bigger ideas that will help me understand it.

In an earlier piece, I identified two ways of viewing the world: the Romantic and the Baroque. There are numerous other ways to do this, of course, but I like the dynamism of this pairing. The Romantic view has less to do with the things we think about when we use the word ‘romance’, and more to do with the values and perspectives that were developed by artists and poets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.