Italian food is about flavor, something that has sadly disappeared frmo much of our mass-produced food in recent years. It is about ripe fruit picked off the tree and eaten while still warm from the sun, fish straight from the water, meat reared and butchered with skill, wine made with the genuine local grapes and matured in seasoned wooden barrels, organic vegetables just dug from richly manured fields with the earth still clinging to their roots. This is not a romantic vision, it is how our food should be!