December 1929. Christmas is approaching in a bustling Milan, where work to cover the Navigli canals has begun with great fanfare from the Futurists, who want to pave the waterways for the automobiles of the modern world. An elegant but busy woman hurries through the door of a beautiful building in Via Monte Napoleone, greeted by the caretaker who smiles, touches his cap and watches her cross quickly through the gleaming marble atrium.
The founder
The woman was Delia Pavoni Notari. Looking younger than her 60 years, she was almost 10 years older than her second husband, Umberto Notari, the brilliant journalist, writer and publisher. They’d been together for almost 30 years. At the time of their marriage, he was a young man of high hopes and she was a young widow, once married to the engineer Giuseppe Magnaghi, owner of a thermal spa in Salsomaggiore. Umberto then founded and ran several very innovative magazines. In 1904, he also wrote a scandalous book, Quelle signore (Those Ladies), set in a Milanese brothel. The protagonist was his friend Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the famous Futurist. It flew off the shelves, even though it cost him a trial for obscenity, during which he was very colorfully defended by Marinetti himself and then acquitted. Notari also founded his own printing press in Villasanta, near Monza (Istituto Editoriale Italiano).
The Notari home was a literary gathering place, where writers, painters, musicians, poets, journalists, political personalities and celebrities came together. This made it the perfect place to celebrate Delia’s idea for the latest editorial initiative: a new magazine, La Cucina Italiana. The first issue was to be published on December 15, as a subscription, just in time for Christmas. A decade earlier, Delia had sensed that the First World War would turn out to be a watershed moment for women. While their husbands were at the front, Italian women discovered they were able to do the same things as men. Suddenly a new middle class was searching for a way of life similar to the upper class it had once considered superior. All of this was built into a theme seen as the epitome of femininity: cooking as a window on the world.
A prestigious “Tasting Committee” would evaluate the proposed food products, all Made in Italy, as a kind of consumer association ahead of its time. Food intellectuals? Indeed. And in no time they were ringing at Delia’s door: professors, industrialists, intellectuals, journalists.
A group of VIPs
There was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the soul of Futurism, and Massimo Bontempelli, the intellectual of “magical realism” who had just challenged another poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, to a duel. And then there was Stefano Benni, founder of Magneti Marelli with Ercole Marelli and Giovanni Agnelli, and poet Paolo Buzzi, to name but a few. In 1963, Ungaretti himself would write a recipe for the publication, a simple and delicious spaghetti that bears his name. In the following years, many men would write about cooking in the newborn magazine. Even though Delia did everything, Umberto would keep the title of director for a long time. She smiled and didn’t care: women remain the stars of the publication’s pages, and have been from the very first issues.
Fanny the intrepid
In 1934, Delia passed the baton to a new director, Francesca “Fanny” Dini. The publication was a success with 100,000 copies and Fanny was a “modern woman”: a war correspondent in the style of Oriana Fallaci, a talented and award-winning poet, an aviator, an intellectual linked to Umberto Primo Conti and a renowned painter who even painted a famous portrait of Pirandello. Fanny was the soul of the magazine until July 1943, when its publication was interrupted by the war. Among the new subscribers of the 1940s is a lively girl named Anna Gosetti who had come to Milan from Viadana, in the lower Lombardy region, in search of a future.
The Gosetti sisters
Born in 1916, Anna had two sisters, Fernanda and Mina, each with her own talent, a bit like a fairy tale. And like a fairy tale, the girls soon lost their parents and moved to Milan. They were full of energy and drive, emerging stronger from the terrible years of conflict, able to navigate Italy’s reconstruction with ease. Having subscribed to the magazine before its abrupt interruption due to the war, they realized the fire for La Cucina Italiana was hiding beneath the ashes, as many letters arrived at the publisher’s old address urging the magazine to reopen and address an existing need. The first thing they decided to do was divide up the responsibilities properly. Anna was the right person to become the director. She would make contacts, find supporters, take care of advertising and monitor trends. To be more in line with the times, she would also take her mother’s last name to become Gosetti della Salda. Fernanda was the one who knew the subject in depth. She could propose recipes, prepare them and respond to readers’ questions by splitting herself into a protean literary figure, signing many columns with different names. Mina was the art director, responsible for all the visual aspects of the page and cover, from graphics to photos of the recipes. An important role for a magazine that should indeed be a feast for the eyes. In this way, it started all over again, but as a continuation: the first issue of the relaunch in January 1952 featured the subtitle, “Magazine of gastronomy and conviviality founded in 1929.”
Signora Olga says...
The topics multiplied and the common thread of reader mail continued, as if publication had ceased not for nine years, but for just nine days. Exquisitely gastronomic questions were answered by Cuoco Cirillo, while advice on home economics, etiquette and everything beyond pure and simple cuisine became the responsibility of “Posta di Caterina.” Under the pseudonyms of Cirillo and Caterina hid the tireless and eclectic Fernanda, who was also the legendary Signora Olga, always ready with the “right extra tip” for each recipe, known for her legendary: “Signora Olga says ...”
And then there was the great intuition of the three sisters, which would characterize the publication to this day: the editorial staff above and a large kitchen in the basement, where recipes are prepared by professional chefs then photographed for the magazine. A “unique selling proposition” that only La Cucina Italiana had: everything done then and there, tested and checked. For real.
Queens in and out of the kitchen
In the year La Cucina Italiana resumed printing, a queen, Elizabeth II, took the throne, destined for a long reign. Women were changing their lifestyles to become who they are today. At the helm of the magazine, after Delia, Fanny and the Gosetti sisters, there have been other “pioneers and innovators,” such as “La Signora” Paola Ricas, daughter of a renowned Futurist painter, who would lead for 25 years, paving the way for Maddalena Fossati Dondero, who heads the magazine today. For her, too, it was in her blood, her father being Mario Dondero, one of the most important photographers of the 20 th century. Indeed, represented by all the women who have made La Cucina Italiana what it is lies a marriage of gastronomy, art and culture that began at Casa Notari on December 15, 1929 in Milan, when Delia held a dinner.