continue … this "classic" in a larger group which included other similar, typical Italian specialties.
Making pizza at home, the classic Neapolitan pizza, is impossible. The temperature required for the wood fire, indispensable for this type of pizza, is excessive for the domestic oven. The technique called fiammata, produced by throwing in a handful of sawdust, is an art, the secret of which is jealously guarded by master pizza makers. Making the dough rise to the right point and rolling it out so that the border turns out high and soft, as it should, is also difficult. And so on into the night.
In fact, pizza, the genuine article, is not a "homemade" food. However, with a bit of practice, this recipe can be satisfactorily imitated at home to produce a product which occasionally is better than some of the pizzas produced by improbable pizza makers throughout the world. But there are other, similar masterpieces, which are easier to reproduce. The tasty focacce, or white pizza, is an example of which one version is found in Liguria.
However, panini, or sandwiches, are another story. Simple and tasty, heavenly for singles and the harried manager without a lunch break, they constitute the most popular source of alimentation in the western world. We shall leave aside the criticism and indignation caused by the incomprehensible (especially in Europe) development of certain restaurant chains which offer preparations (hamburgers) in which neither the bread and the filling nor the seasoning represent the smallest trace of any taste familiar to a rational mind.
The subject of virtual cooking, food intended as a "stomach filler", of the prize found in a bag of potato chips, will all be taken up and elaborated further on.
In my opinion, even this type of food may attract, but is pleasure in the mental sense, in the sense of the awesome, of transgression, however, when we speak of real cooking, real food, I cannot imagine what could possibly induce anyone to prefer a soggy, greasy and insipid chemical preparation to a good, freshly made mortadella or salami sandwich.
I am so convinced of the superiority of the Italian panino over any other type of fast food that I would hypothesize the panino's becoming the new Trojan Horse for the forces of Italian gastronomy, which has already spread the fame of Italian food throughout the world.
Once more, the Italian capacity to blend, to combine extraordinary raw materials reaches vertiginous heights. The art of the panino has gradually become a virtual philosophy of style, especially in northern Italy (in Venice, there is the cicchetto which we will describe later on), an area where a rapid and unexpected social-economic evolution has resulted in millions of individuals having neither the time nor the desire to stop at midday for a complete meal. Sandwich bars throughout the country have suddenly substituted sit down restaurants and "meals at home with mamma at the stove". The answer was to turn to the panino, reinventing a manner of nourishment which was not extraneous to us and to our culture.
In the past twenty years, there has been an increase in people who resolve their everyday problem of eating by leaning on a counter, consuming panini (sandwiches), pizzas, rustici (savory puff pastries) and supplì (fried rice balls), instead of what was once considered the main meal of the day.
There is no Italian who has not lunched on panini, an eating habit which in any case takes us back to our collective childhood and the snacks of bread with butter and sugar or bread with oil and salt, coffee with milk and a roll to dunk in it. And I shall stop here before getting too sentimental.

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