Dawn broke earier this morning

The sun popped through briefly today. Dawn broke earlier. I ran 11 and felt good in the last three. It's hard to run in a place so flat. That sounds strange. But my hometown is hilly. I noticed this when I lived in Chicago: flat ground taxes your hamstrings differently than hilly ground, which on uphills switches some of the burden to your quads.

This is still a running blog, but running is intimately connected with food, so on an unrelated note: why is Italy so associated with food and pleasure in (at least) the Anglo-American mind? When did we start thinking Italy was a place where we ate with reckless abandon, where the food was better, where it had a more organic connection to the land (itself a fantasy), to the people (another fantasy), to the labor and leisure of everyday life (three fantasies)?

I ask this question not in the spirit of a demystifying critique--as if telling everyone that pasta is a social construction would somehow make it less delicious (and isn't this, at bottom, every academic's stick-it-to-'em, sadistic fantasy?)--but in the spirit of a real historical inquiry. Where does this idea come from?

A few preliminary thoughts: let's look in the nineteenth century, where everything about national difference starts. During the 19c, tons of English and American intellectuals and aesthetes ventured to Italy: Hawthorne, Henry James, Pater, Ruskin, to name a scant few. These are all more or less post 1850-(Hawthorne excepted), and there are more I'm sure from the early 19c. When you read 19c accounts of Italy such as James's or Ruskin's, food is not the focus. Architecture and manners are. Food comes in later. When exactly? Let's do more research.

Off the top of my head, A Moveable Feast is the earliest travelogue I can think of that has food in it. Actually, not food but (best I can remember, and this is what I love) beer: Hemmingway talks about beer that's "cold and good." Only Hemmingway can get away with not only using adjectives to talk about food, which is a Freshman writing no-no, but that the adjectives are so completely common. Seriously though, when it comes to beer, other adjectives would somehow miss the mark, and what he's describing isn't a quality of the beer; he's describing (or performing) the way beer gives you permission to stop searching for the perfect adjectives, permission to surrender intellect to sensation. That's why it works as prose.

So, maybe my question is, when does food enter begin to enter into Anglo-American Italian travelogues? If we can answer this, we can figure out when Italy and food came to entail one another in the Ango cultural imaginary. I tried the new google word assocation tool but "food" so completely exceeds "Italy" in frequency that I can't get anything out of it. Anyone know a way to measure change in frequency of correlation?