Food, Markets and Festivities in Italian Towns: Provisioning, Cooking and Carnival

Food in late-medieval and Renaissance Italian towns depended on connections between countryside, markets and household kitchens. Grain, fuel and other provisions had to reach dense urban communities, while cooks turned ingredients into meals using methods ranging from boiling and roasting to frying and drying. Fourteenth-century Florence’s grain market and fifteenth-century recipes by Maestro Martino offer concrete views of supply and preparation.

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What medieval cookbooks reveal

The Liber de Coquina, or Book of Cooking, survives in two manuscripts copied in the early fourteenth century. Its authors are unknown, and the work comprises two independent parts, with titles taken from notes added by a medieval editor. The second part is generally associated with an Italian author from the Naples area, although that attribution is not certain.

The Liber de Coquina includes preparations for vegetables, legumes, fish, meat and pastry, often combining ingredients in stages. Such collections preserved a cook’s knowledge of texture, flavour and combinations, while their use required practical experience with heat, vessels and ingredients. Martino’s later vernacular work gives particularly clear directions for turning dough and vegetables into finished dishes.

Professional cooking and elite dining

Maestro Martino, also known as Martino da Como, was a professional cook whose career included service to Ludovico Trevisan, a cardinal and patriarch of Aquileia known for lavish banquets. Martino’s Libro de Arte Coquinaria took shape through the middle decades of the fifteenth century. Written in the vernacular rather than Latin, it arranged recipes by course and ingredient and sometimes suggested substitutions when a particular ingredient was unavailable.

For maccaroni romaneschi, Martino instructed the cook to make a sheet of dough a little thicker than lasagne, wind it around a stick, remove the stick and cut finger-width ribbons. These went into already boiling fatty broth, or water according to the season. When water was used, he added fresh butter and a little salt. The cooked pasta was served on dishes with good cheese, butter and sweet spices. Shaping, boiling and finishing were distinct stages.

Other preparations show how chopping and repeated cooking changed texture. For parsley roots, Martino removed the central core, cleaned and cooked the roots in meat broth, then chopped them finely and returned them to good fatty broth with pepper and saffron. The recipe treated the root as the substance of a dish, while broth supplied richness and spices added flavour and colour.

Markets, shops and everyday meals

Florence’s Orsanmichele brought provisioning into the city centre. Its fourteenth-century building combined a grain-market loggia below with two large storage halls above. The commune maintained grain reserves there to support the city’s food supply and reduce famine risk. Storage joined buying and selling to a public concern: securing provisions beyond the needs of any single household.

Grain moved through several kinds of work before becoming a meal: transport and storage, milling into flour, mixing dough and baking bread or preparing other grain dishes. Households and food sellers depended on these connections. A city could therefore face hunger even when fields outside it remained productive, if war, transport problems or market disruption obstructed supplies.

Carnival, fasting and public celebration

Carnival preceded Lent, the Christian season of penitence leading to Easter. Meat abstinence changed the ingredients appropriate to particular days, while the period before fasting offered occasions for public feasting and entertainment. Martino’s distinction between cooking in meat broth or water shows a cook adapting preparations to this calendar. Choices of fat, sauce and accompaniment could also change the character of a dish.

In Venice, a Senate proclamation of 1296 recognised a public festival on the day before Lent. Florence’s Carnival could include large public games, as during the celebrated match of calcio, a Florentine ball game, played in 1530 while the city was under siege. Such events brought food, music and organised spectacle into a seasonal setting, alongside the quieter preparation and consumption of meals.

Urban food depended on work at different scales. Communal stores helped secure grain, merchants and carriers moved supplies, and cooks transformed ingredients through learned techniques. Professional recipes record particular dishes, while markets and storage buildings show the infrastructure needed to feed a city. The religious calendar gave some changes of menu and public celebration a recurring place within the year.

For the wider setting, see Daily Life in Medieval and Early Modern Italian Cities: Households, Work, and Community.