Breaking Bread: The Filmic Foodscape of Postwar Italy

Italy is celebrated around the world for its cuisine: simple, rustic, and tasteful. Likewise, Italy’s cinema has continuously garnered great acclaim. Yet, the history behind their food – and the ways it has been treated in media – is decidedly more complicated.
In Breaking Bread, the worlds of anthropology, economics, gender studies, history, biochemistry, and cultural and literary studies collide on one plate. Food and film are Niki Kiviat’s guiding pillars as she explores great transformations in Italy’s consumption in the decades following the Second World War – years in which austerity morphed into radical gluttony. Historians argue that Italy’s eating habits changed relatively little in this period, but as these films posit, the transition from hunger to excess – and from starvation to supermarkets – is not only apparent but enormous. Through its analyses of mise en scène, employment of influential stars, and theories and retrospectives by key directors, Breaking Bread reveals both the progression and devolution of Italy’s filmic foodscape from 1954 to 1973.
Following the diegesis of Italy’s transition from hunger to abundance across these decades, as visceral needs morphed into other forms of desire, this book portrays how the anxieties surrounding food began as a light-hearted, comedic nostalgia, but later transitioned into fatalistic panic.

Earning her postgraduate degrees at Columbia University, Niki Kiviat currently serves on the World Language Faculty at Greenwich Country Day School, where she teaches Italian and Spanish.