Mario Soldati and his Viaggio nella Valle del Po: A culinary journey between early television and Italian culinary identity.

This chapter analyses Mario Soldati's Viaggio lungo la Valle del Po (Journey along the Po Valley), the first Italian food show broadcast by the public service television Rai in 1957. Drawing on studies on television and on the construction of food culture, and adopting multimodal analysis, the chapter investigates the relationships between the TV show and Italy's politics and culture in the 1950s. The results show that the programme was an extraordinary means through which public service television mediated conservative social values and a nostalgic idea of the Italian past. More generally, the chapter highlights the enormous power of food television in negotiating ideologies.