Puccini and the kitchen       

It is well known that in the classic music world the pleasures of the table have always belonged to the way of life of the most important compositors. Many historical decisions have been traced during lavish meals washed down by a good and full-bodied wine. This is the case of the “ intensive” evening at Milan in an important town hotel between Mascagni and Puccini. A crowning of many years of straits the two musicians must bear during their studies at the Conservatory of Milan, when they lived in the same

little room so to save. Getting back to the young years we find Puccini paying attention to the pleasures of the table, even if money lacked. Notwithstanding, the hearty eater got the upper hand, but in an active way, since the compositor amused himself cooking new special meals. All that reflects his active and independent character, a perfect transposition from music to cookery. The meal Puccini loved to cook was the pasta with eels, meeting always with the outstanding success among his friend. In the book by Silvestro Severgnini “Invitation to listen to Puccini” it is highlighted interesting aspects, nice and particular,

throwing a new light on his life: “... in the afternoon, when I have money I go to the café, but it passes a lot of evenings I cannot go, since a punch costs 40 cents (...) I do not starve. I eat a little bad, but I stuff myself with minestrone, “thin broth...” The stomach is satisfied “. (1) After years of straits, when this experiences were already a memory, Puccini kept on cooking, these time for amusement, for the noisy group of friends, when he was in the haunting hide at Torre del Lago. There was another meal the musician cooked with pleasure, that is the “herrings with radishes “. It is known he did not lose any opportunity to sit down at table with his friends, eating with gusto and ending with a very good and strong “toscano”, to end the evening perfectly.His most beautiful and meaningful works express intimately the taste for the beautiful and the pleasure-loving. The most fascinating situations closely remind a philosophical vision of life with a bit of irony. For example “Le Villi”, represented for the first time on May 31st 1884, has Roberto as protagonist dealing with a dissolute life. The romantic and rash image of the personage reminds the almost student's way of life of the compositor. The passion for hunting made Puccini discover the special cooking of the game, tasty and strong flavoured. Many times after hunting he met with his friend to roast pheasants and fry partridges. These evening he told dirty stories and as chronicle reports 'he made farts competitions”. The image we get is surely far from the seriousness usually related to the melodrama and the classic music, and it proves that the man knew how to amuse himself and enjoy life without preventing the musician to carry out his splendid activity of composition. We end reporting another fragment from the Severgnini's book that reveals the love of the Maestro for the rustic and simple life: “... so that when a day in 1884, the Maestro passed occasionally by Massaciuccoli, “felt” immediately that this “dear and blessed “ strip of the Tuscan land between Lucca and Pisa, was his elective native land... In 1891, Puccini gets back to the “Eden”, where he had already left his hart and settles there definitively “ (2). An exact cross-section of the philosophy of life of Puccini, proving exactly the love for live that has always gone with him..

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