Stanley Tucci: The Italian hidden gem travellers still haven’t heard of

By Lauren Taylor, PA

With Italy’s hotspots well and truly trodden by tourists, finding corners of the country that are still a mystery to travellers can seem rare. But according to actor Stanley Tucci, Le Marche should be on our radars.

So far, the north-central region on the Adriatic coast, and its unique cuisine, has largely escaped international attention – so now may be the time to visit.

The Academy Award nominee and Emmy and Golden Globe winner is back with the second instalment of his Disney+ and National Geographic show Tucci In Italy – visiting five new regions of the country and navigating its culinary past and present.

While the first series, which dropped in 2025, focussed on the likes of Tuscany and Lombardy, the second allowed Italian-American Tucci, whose family have roots in Calabria, to explore places he’d never been to before.

This time in the five-part show, the 65-year-old visits Naples and Campania, Veneto and the large islands of Sicily and Sardinia – as well as Le Marche – familiar to Italians but far less-known to the rest of the world.

Tucci touts it as “one of the most beautiful and cultured regions of the country, with a cuisine to match, that even now is still ripe for discovery”, in the show.

“There are places that you never thought existed [in Le Marche],” says The Devil Wears Prada 2 star.

With 180km of coastline of beautifully clean beaches, dramatic mountains and Renaissance towns, the region offers a side of Italy where locals far outweigh tourists, and authenticity and preserving history is at its heart.

Tucci visits the southern Le Marche town of Ascoli Piceno to discover their aperitivo culture, inland Macerata for an ancient recipe for layered pasta dish made with sweet wine, the coastal high-end area of Senigallia and the limestone cliff-flanked Conero Riveria for a unique type of hand-dived wild mussels called moscioli.

“It’s exciting to be able to find a really simple dish of mussels, but those mussels are very specific, where they grow, how they’re cultivated, the flavour of them and what they’re what they’re made with – I’ve never had a dish like that before.”

Tucci visits a beachside restaurant called Da Emilia in the Bay of Portonovo, opened by the current owner’s grandmother in 1929, and still serving her exact recipe of spaghetti with moscioli.

“I’d been to that coast, but I’d never gone to that little place where there were all these restaurants in a row, and where we found the woman who makes this dish that her grandmother made.

“Their grandmother was the first one to build a little restaurant there after the war, and that was like life-changing to me – as it was for that entire community, because they were very poor.

“And, eventually, now La Marche is one of the wealthiest regions in Italy and one of the best looked after.”

The food of a country is often wrapped up in centuries old-stories, hand-me-down recipes and fascinating contextual history, and for Tucci, eating really is “the best way” to learn about a destination.

“[Filming this series] just solidifies the fact that I love Italy so much and that I’ll never stop being interested in that food. And through that food, for me, it’s the best way for me to learn about that country.”

It’s clear how much the country of his heritage means him. “I just want to show the complexity of Italy and the diversity of it, because Italy is not a huge country, it’s long and narrow and it sits like a sitting duck, in a weird way, surrounded by Eastern Europe, Greece, Africa and the Middle East.

“All of those people, over thousands of years, invaded Italy, and gave what they created – what today is Italian cuisine.”

So while many people head to Italy to tuck into the famous pizza of Naples, pasta of Rome and the Fiorentina steak of Tuscany, for Tucci, “The most important thing is to show the diversity, to show the complexity of the culture through the food.

“But also geographically,” he adds. “The topography of Italy is so incredibly diverse, from Sicily to Trentino-Alto Adige, it’s like two completely different countries, not only because of the invasions and the ever-changing borders, but because of the topography and the climate.”

In Veneto, Tucci wades into the culinary debate over the origins of tiramisu, while in Sardinia he looks into the relationship between food and longevity.

Meanwhile in Campania, Tucci meets a Michelin-starred chef cooking ‘spaghettino alle vongole fujute’ – meaning ‘runaway clams’ (you can only taste the aroma – the clams are an illusion). It’s a pasta with tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and parsley, cooked with his special ingredient – large rocks from the sea – served in the dish.

“Now you can’t even conceive of such a thing, and yet, it’s a dish that’s been around probably for centuries,” says the actor.

If he could eat any pasta dish in Italy again it would be “that one”, says Tucci. “I swear it was incredible.”

All episodes of Tucci In Italy S2 stream May 12th on Disney+, with the series also premiering the same day at 8pm on National Geographic UK.