ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on texts produced by two Americans who have either travelled or re-settled in Italy since the early 1990s and whose writings reflect a profound fascination with the country's cuisine the area where the majority of the works in question are set. For Frances Mayes and Gary Paul Nabhan, Italy becomes representative of Mediterranean culture, and food holds a key role in their negotiation of the foreign. For both writers, Italy frequently stands metonymically for the Mediterranean, and the foods encountered, too, fall within this boundary. Many factors constituting this so-called Mediterranean diet are not in fact originally Mediterranean, but rather issue from a recent history of cultural exchanges with the world's other regions and continents. In Mayes's texts, the viewpoint that emerges is one that often reiterates the North American's orientalizing gaze towards the Italian other, another that is easily 'digested'.
