A new paperback edition, with a renewed cover and unpublished texts, of the book Ferdinando Scianna made by tracing, in his own memory, his working life and his many encounters, the part that food — taken as the culture of eating — has had in shaping recollections, impressions and ideas. Everything that turns around culinary tradition becomes the pretext for bringing back images, tastes, places and people bound up with cultural tradition, with the history of a people and a region and with the author’s own small personal history. The baskets lowered by the women of the Sicily of his childhood, the cries of the sellers of bread and panelle, lemon leaves, the scent of wild fennel, the granitas of Acireale; but also milk fresh from the udder, fish with human faces, the duck eaten in Paris, chocolate in Oaxaca, the meatballs of Scorsese’s mother, or the snack of Ferran Adrià. For each there is a deep recollection, a penetrating and lasting taste and often an image, in the classic manner of great documentary work. "I have carried this book with me for many years," he writes. "At the beginning it was not even a book project. It was part of that play of mirrors with memory which, since writing became more important to me, has come to stand dialectically beside my work with the camera."