The Well-Fed Bong

As pointed out by many a worthy, Italy is fiercely regional and the food changes quite a bit even a short distance away. However, fed all my life on a mish-mash of different kinds of Italian dishes, it took some time before I started noticing the differences. The differences are not quite as stark as India where the Punjabi finds avial inedible and a true Bengali won't come anywhere near curd rice, but they are quite distinct nevertheless. In this bicycle ride I was going only in one direction, I soon realised that repeats of many things I had loved (or missed out on) were not possible - Florentine lampredotti and Milanese risotto are about as easily available as a masala dosa in faraway Lecce. I whizzed through six regions in Italy and the one thing they had in common (other than the Indo-Swiss Express) was that, by some strange coincidence, they all had center-left governments. Indeed, with the tiny exception of South Tyrol, my trip turned out to be a perfect cleave between cente...