Joining the actor in Florence, Sophie Morris is guided away from tourist hordes to try local delicacies involving unexpected parts of cows’ innards
Does breakfasting on a cow’s fourth stomach appeal? Since it comes on Stanley Tucci’s recommendation, I submit to the earthy-tasting offal sandwich around 9am on a blindingly bright June day in Florence.
Lampredotto, tripe boiled in a herby broth and served in a soft bun, is an authentically Florentine tradition. We eat in the shade of the Triperia Pollini food cart, an infamous spot on the corner of Borgo do Croce in the Sant’Ambrogio neighbourhood, a network of medieval streets in Florence’s centro storico. We’re only minutes from the Duomo but worlds away from the crowds outside Palazzo Vecchio, the queues curling around the Uffizi and the overpriced tourist restaurants.
Triperia Pollini is the last of its kind in the neighbourhood. Though visitors flock to this beautiful Tuscan city - too many according to some frustrated locals - very few have lampredotto on their menu of must eats. Meanwhile, most Florentines have been priced out of Sant’Ambrogio.
The actor and writer Tucci, 64, admits he was wary of the dish himself. “I like tripe,” he says. “But for some reason, this sounded really gross and I was not looking forward to it. But it was incredible!” “Would your family eat it?” I ask. “They’d better,” he deadpans.
Whatever your stance on offal, it’s a surprisingly decent hangover cure. The previous evening, Tucci and his crew hosted a dinner at one of his favourite Florentine trattorias, Cammillo, a place that looks so perfectly Italian with its white tablecloths, tiled floors and ornate lighting that it might have been built for a film set.
The feast included platters of the best local prosciutto with artichokes, deep-fried sage leaves stuffed with anchovy, a classic bean and pasta dish in broth and panzanella bread salad - all washed down with Italian wines including lambrusco, pinot grigio and regional chianti. The money shot, huge T-bones of bistecca alla fiorentina, are scorched on a charcoal grill and served in thick slices, bright pink on the inside.
To be fair, Florence is packed with money shots, from the Ponte Vecchio to Michelangelo’s David, but the reputation of its artistic and architectural treasures often drowns out the pleasures it can offer both greedy and gourmet travellers.
Tucci, star of Conclave and The Hunger Games films, is here to film Tucci in Italy, a five-part series on National Geographic in which he reprises his role as tour guide to Italian food, a career strand forged in recent years via a number of cookbooks and food memoirs, a genteel cocktail-shaking Instagram profile, and two series of Searching for Italy for the BBC.
The first episode of this new show features his travels across Tuscany including Florence, where he spent a year of his youth.
Tucci is Italian-American and says that food is “the thing I can’t stop thinking about”.
Why is food so central to Italian identity? “It’s a really fertile peninsula,” he points out. “And you’ve had a number of influences over the centuries. It’s a way to create comfort. One of the reasons Italy is so familial is because it was invaded so many times, and so the only people you could really trust was your family.”
That’s certainly true in Florence, a city known for its feuds as much as its wealth, where palaces were linked by secret passages and underground tunnels, because it was dangerous to roam the streets.
Tucci is at the start of a long day of filming, so I wander down the Via dei Macci with Emiko Davies, an Australian-Japanese food writer who came to Florence more than 20 years ago. Gusts of sweet air engulf us as we enter Leonardo, baker of cantucci biscuits.
They slice a fat loaf for us fresh from the oven to taste while the chocolate is meltingly warm and the orange fragrant. We leave clutching Leonardo’s chic green gift bags and head for the Sant’Ambrogio food market.
The bustling heartbeat of the neighbourhood is flush with stalls of gleaming aubergine, bulbous heritage tomatoes and leafy herbs. Inside, butchery counters advertise lardo di colonnata, which Tucci has already said is one of his all-time favourite foods.
For this series, he visited Carrara, where pork fat is cured with salt and herbs between slabs of white marble. “It’s what the stonecutters eat, and it’s what Michaelangelo used to eat,” he says.
We retrace our steps, landing at Cibrèo, a clutch of food businesses founded in 1979 by the late chef Fabio Picchi, who knew he needed to show off Florence’s food while tourist trap pizza and gelato stalls proliferated. A cavalry of taster dishes arrives, from fresh ricotta, fat anchovies and pickled spring vegetables to another dish of tripe, this one insalata di trippa, tender strips with a crunchy skin, and reportedly the cow’s first stomach.
Vegetarians don’t have to miss out on the tripe experience. At Dalla Lola, a modern trattoria near the Boboli Gardens with an innovative take on heritage dishes, tripa finta is a vegetarian fake tripe that emerged when even a cow’s stomach became too expensive for many cooks, during the Mussolini and wartime eras.
Naturally, I make time for what is perhaps Florence’s most famous export, the negroni. The cocktail is said to have been invented at Caffe Giacosa, close to the Palazzo Strozzi, for the Count Camillo Negroni. He wanted to dial up the strength of his Americano and the bartender replaced the soda water with gin. Reopened a couple of years ago, the brooding interiors are new, but like all Florence’s best exports, the recipe remains the same.
‘Tucci in Italy’ starts on Wednesday at 8pm on National Geographic and all episodes stream from tonight on Disney+ Travel essentials How to get there Florence is served from the UK by Vueling and British Airways. Pisa, around an hour away, is served by BA, EASYJET and Ryanair.
Where to stay Stella D’Italia has doubles from £200, stelladitaliaflorence.com More information feelflorence.it/en visittuscany.com