Customer Reviews
from the dustjacket - By: Cooks Bookery, 22 Apr 2008 
In 1611 Giacomo Castelvetro was saved from the clutches of the Inquisition in Venice by the intervention of the British ambassador. Sir Dudley Carleton. In 1614, when in exile in England, he wrote The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy in an attempt to persuade people to eat a wider variety of fruit & vegetables. Castelvetro was horrified by the vast quantities of meat & sweet things that the British consumed, though he admitted that they helped to keep out the cold. By describing the gastronomic delights of his beloved Italy he hoped to convince his readers of the benefits to be obtained from the cultivation & preparation of new & unfamiliar plants. He even dreamt of teaching the English how to make a decent salad.
Castelvetro takes us through the gardener's year, listing the fruit & vegetables as they come into season, with simple & elegant ways of preparing them. Practical instructions are interspersed with tender little vignettes of life in his native city Modena, memories of his years in Venice & reminiscences of his travels in Europe. He writes of children learning to swim in the canals of the Brenta, strapped to huge dried pumpkins to keep them afloat; Venetian ladies ogling passers by from behind screens of verdant beanstalks; sulky German wenches jealously hoarding their grape harvest; & his intimate chats with Scandinavian royalty about the best way to graft pear cuttings & discomfort the Pope ...
While exiled in England Castelvetro took refuge in the household of Sir Adam Newton at Eltham. He wrote his book there & distributed copies of it in manuscript to eminent people who, he hoped, might befriend him. One of these was Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, a keen gardener & generous patroness of writers & poets. She was a brilliant member of the glittering court of James I, & through her Castelvetro hoped to find employment for his skills as translator, editor & teacher. But the manuscript dedicated to Lucy remained unpublished, & Castelvetro died, poor, ill & unhappy in 1616.
This is the first English translation of his work. His charming & instructive writing will at last find the wide readership it deserves. His message is as fresh today as it was four hundred years ago eat more fruit & vegetables!
About the translator: Gillian Riley is a freelance book designer & illustrator, educated at Girton College, Cambridge, who has spent many years studying the history of Italian cookery. She was once a runner up in the Observer/Mouton Cadet Cookery Competition & lives in Stoke Newington, London, where she cooks enthusiasticallly from a huge collection of cookery books, using herbs & spices from alll over the world.
