My immediate reaction to Why Italians Love to Talk About Food was, this is a perfect companion to the Lonely Planet guidebook edition covering Italy. If you don't take every opportunity to visit as many restaurants, cafes, bars and eating establishments and the traditional trattoria, osteria and tavola calda or whatever other place where you can eat, then you have missed out on a key experience of Italy and what it means to be Italian.

Like travelling through Italy, where each corner you turn has the potential to present an unforgettable visual experience, turning each page of this book has the potential to tickle, tease and tantalise your tastebuds.

Kostioukovitch seems to be someone who is passionate about her food and especially Italian food. She devotes a chapter to each of the 19 regions of Italy. She writes about each regions' food from a historical, economical, cultural and political perspective and blends it within a religious, social and festival context. We are left with a sense of how food is intrinsically part of the social fabric of Italy. She dispels some of the myths - I thought Marco Polo was instrumental in the introduction of pasta to Italy, but I found that pasta has been traced back to 1,500 years before Polo was even a twinkle in his fathers eye.

Each of these chapters concludes with a boxed section devoted to the Typical Dishes .. in terms of an Antipasta, First & Second Course and Dessert and Typical Products .. (Grains, fruits, poultry, venison, fish, meat, etc.) of the various regions. These regional menus provide an insight to the wide diversity of food types and cooking traditions from a country with a land mass of only 301,230 sq km (1,185 km long and 381 km wide). Sometimes, neighbouring cities can prepare and present the same dish so differently that you would think the dishes were unrelated.

An interesting approach adopted by Kostioukovitch is to intersperse chapters covering particular and unrelated subjects on topics, as diverse as, Olive Oil, Pasta, Democracy, Eros, Pilgrims, Jews, Diet, Methods of Preparation and Sauces to name a few. The subject matter within these chapters examines the introduction, influence and evolution of food, eating and the enjoyment thereof.

Italian food, in it's variety of forms and styles, has historically had a influence on eating habits through-out the world and, having read Why Italians Love to Talk About Food, I can undertand why. This is not a book to be read from cover to cover but one to just jump into at any point and savour.