Folk-singing was my first vocation, but I made a sudden left turnĀ into comedy, becoming one-half of The Times Square Two.Ā After a few years touring the world, I settled in Hollywood andĀ became an actor, writer, and director. I was inspired to write TheĀ Food Taster by the maĆ®tre dā of a famous restaurant in LosĀ Angeles. When I complained that my meal had made me ill, heĀ smiled and said I should get myself a food taster.
Thereās nothing I relish more than spending an evening withĀ friends, telling stories. ThatāsĀ The Decameron in a nutshell,Ā except its ten friends regale one another while hiding out from theĀ Black Death, in the 1300s. I savored the many tales aboutĀ love, tragic or poignant, and I laughed out loud at the storiesĀ ridiculing the clergy.
In the summer of 1348, as the Black Death ravages their city, ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside...
Taken from the Greek, meaning 'ten-day event', Boccaccio's Decameron sees his characters amuse themselves by each telling a story a day, for the ten days of their confinement - a hundred stories of love and adventure, life and death, and surprising twists of fate. Less preoccupied with abstract concepts of morality or religion than earthly values, the tales range from the bawdy Peronella, hiding her lover in a tub, to Ser Cepperallo, who, despite his unholy effrontery, becomes a Saint.ā¦
Researching the trials and tribulations of a Renaissance foodĀ taster meant that I had to become familiar with the court cuisineĀ of the period, the ingredients used in their preparation, and mostĀ vitally, the politics of the kitchen. I was delighted to find thatĀ many of Platinaās recipes can still be enjoyed today; I haveĀ made cabbage stuffed with walnuts, chicken fried with dicedĀ lemon, and my personal favorite, cherry cheesecake.
I highly recommend the works of Pietro Aretino. I love satire, and Aretino was a satirist for the ages. I admired his raw courage, for he spared no oneāincluding kings and popesāon his way to earning the title āScourge of Princes.ā He died in his early sixties, reportedly from ālaughing too much.ā I cannot imagine an epitaph I would rather have engraved on my headstone.
I appreciate people who donāt shrink from celebrating their ownĀ genius, and Benvenuto Cellini was indeed a genius at it. Still, IĀ didnāt mind his boasting, whether it was about his intricate works as a goldsmith or his killing of a rival, for his sense of humorĀ about himself more than made up for his monstrous ego. AndĀ even if he had left us nothing else but his autobiography, heĀ bequeathed to us a brilliant record of the Renaissance.
Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who at different times experienced both papal persecution and imprisonment, and the adulation of the royal court. Inn-keepers and prostitutes, kings and cardinals, artists and soldiers rub shoulders in the pages of his notorious autobiography: a vivid portrait of the manners and morals of both the rulers of the day and of their subjects. Written with supremeā¦
Burckhardtās encyclopedia became my bible. Whatever I neededĀ to know about the clothing, or the buildings, or the politicsāorĀ anything else about that period, I only had to open BurckhardtāsĀ book, and it was all there for me. The information was easy toĀ find and eminently readable; and while I am hardly a scholar ofĀ the Renaissance, after devouring his book a thousand times IĀ believe I can now call myself an honorable student.
For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics. In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideasā¦
When Ugo Di Fonte, a starving peasant, and his beautifulĀ daughter Miranda are snatched from their farm by the despotĀ Duke Federico, Ugo thinks life canāt get any worse. Heās wrong.Ā The Duke orders Ugo to be his new food taster, a hazardous jobĀ made even more so by the Dukeās many enemies (including theĀ cook). But itās not just the food thatās dangerous. MirandaāsĀ beauty brings perils of its own as she attracts the attention of theĀ Duke himself. Ugo realizes he must find a way to protectĀ Miranda from all those who desire her: his master, her lover, andĀ perhaps, most sinisterly, his own lascivious brother.
