Lorenza de' Medici, an author, TV host, and cooking school director "who showed that Italian cuisine was about more than tomatoes, pizza and pasta," died June 23, the New York Times reported. She was 97. A direct descendant of the storied Medici clan that ruled Florence during the Italian Renaissance, she also offered intimate one-day to one-week cooking courses at her family's winery outside Florence, Badia a Coltibuono.
In books like Italy the Beautiful Cookbook (1988) and The Renaissance of Italian Cooking (1989) and later in her 13-part PBS show, The de' Medici Kitchen, she contended that Italian cooking "could be something else entirely: light salads and soups, elegant preparations and, above all, fresh ingredients, ideally bought that morning from a local farmer," the Times noted, adding that her cooking "was explicitly upper class. She called her food 'the villa table,' a blend of regional influences favored by wealthier Italian families."
Her books were lavishly illustrated with photographs of Badia a Coltibuono and other estates, most of them owned by friends, and accompanied by narratives of languorous meals shared during her tours of the country. Among her other titles are Tuscany: The Beautiful Cookbook, The Heritage of Italian Cooking, and The Villa Table: 300 Classic Italian Recipies.
Earlier in her career, she had been an editor at Novitá, a fashion magazine that later became part of Vogue Italia, where de' Medici eventually became food editor. During the 1960s, she switched to writing books, beginning with a series for children, including the cookbook Giochiamo alla Cucina (Let's Play at Cooking).
De' Medici created a series of 365 recipes for a Milanese women's magazine "that modified traditional Italian cuisine to a modern family's needs. And she began to think more broadly about how to bring the cuisine she loved as a child to the world," the Times wrote.
"How could the precious culinary heritage of the past be adapted so that it would be practical for the 20th century without losing any of its essential character, either in substance or in style?" she asked in the introduction to The Renaissance of Italian Cooking. De' Medici largely retired in the mid-2000s.