The Wines of Renaissance Italy: Sante Lancerio, Bottler to the Pope, a Zoom Webinar by Allen Grieco, Senior Research Associate Emeritus at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies
Presented by the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago and DePaul University in anticipation of the 5th Annual Week of Italian Cuisine in the World
Tuesday, November 10th, 11:30am-12:30pm Central Time
Register here
The 5th Annual Week of Italian Cuisine in the World will take place this year from November 16 to November 22, 2020. This yearly initiative was developed to promote Italian culinary traditions and food-and- wine connoisseurship as a distinctive trait of Italian identity and culture.
The papal court, and a plethora of cardinals from all over Christendom who entertained their own lesser courts, helped to make mid-16th century Rome one of the richest and most cosmopolitan centers of the world. Such a concentration of wealth and power could only bring with it a developed attention to the pleasures of life including the wines that were available for the tables of the rich and powerful. It is thanks to an extraordinary document that we have some information about the high quality wines served at the papal court in an effort to outshine all others. Sante Lancerio, the author of this document and the bottler to Pope Paul III (1468-1549), is known only thanks to his of-cited letter. Sent to Cardinal Guido Ascanio Sforza (the pope’s nephew) in the early 1550’s, he described in detail no less than fifty-four wines sold on the Roman market that both he and his employer deemed particularly worthy of note. The document is an unicum and the first known example of tasting notes in wine history: it contains a tantalizing mixture of still familiar but also unfamiliar wine jargon that poses the question of how to communicate tastes with words.
Allen Grieco is Senior Research Associate Emeritus at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies). He has published extensively on the cultural history of food in Italy from the 14th to the 16th centuries and has recently published a book on Food, Social Politics and the Order of the World in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019). He is also co-editor in chief of Food & History and is in charge of a book series, Food Culture, Food History (13th-19th centuries), published by Amsterdam University Press. His more recent work has focused on the taxonomic and classificatory systems applied to New World foodstuffs.