Perhaps the most comforting piece of television since David Attenborough's Planet Earth Series', is the upcoming CNN special where Stanley Tucci stars in a new docu-series titled, Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.
Premiering on February 14 (EST) on CNN, the series follows Tucci, a third-generation Italian American as he travels to his ancestral homeland to explore Italian culture and food, and the ways they are of course, historically tied to one another.
Tucci has noted that he is hoping to change the way Americans specifically view Italy, "They don't get the extreme diversity of it -- that if you're in Sicily you're less than 100 miles from the coast of Africa, and if you're in northern Italy in Alto Adige, people are speaking Swiss, Italian, German -- a combination of Italian-German and Swiss-German," he tells CNN.
"I'd like people to see that incredible diversity, and how it came about -- from geography, from invasions, from the influences of the Arab world, from the Spanish, the Normans, the Austrians. It's an incredible culinary melting pot."
We obviously are still not getting off this very large island any time soon, so Tucci's take of Italy should be enough to placate us for the time being. It's not as though we've watched countless episodes of Bourdain's Parts Unknown since the pandemic began and now have nothing else to offer a reprieve. Right?
The first episode of Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy will air on CNN and CNN Go on February 14. For those outside of the US, you can stream CNN via a VPN and a cable subscription with an affiliated provider. It's also available on Sling TV. Or you can watch the series on YouTube TV for a subscription with your VPN. But you will need an American payment method to access the free trials for any of these services.
Watch a sneak peak of the series, in which Tucci samples wine from tiny windows donned, "Little Doors of Paradise" in the walls of old buildings, walks the streets of Tuscany, and eats large quantities of pasta. Bliss
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