CNN's Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy has helped make its star a 60-year-old sex symbol

The New Yorker

Stanley Tucci's docuseries is "ostensibly educational," says Helen Rosner. "Each episode takes viewers on a tour of a specific region, and in each Tucci spends a bit of time with scholars and activists, discussing some aspect of the region’s history or politics or social strife. But mostly he eats, and talks about eating, and visits the farmers and producers and venders who provision his marvellous meals. Italy is beautiful. The food of Italy is beautiful. Not insignificantly, Stanley Tucci is beautiful, too. He strolls the narrow thoroughfares of Florence and Naples with the physical eloquence of a dancer, at once smoldering and restrained. He gazes at wheels of cheese and swirls of pasta as if the food must be seduced before it will consent to be devoured. The Tucci of Searching for Italy is a figure out of time: thick-framed glasses, white pants, a rich leather belt, a linen shirt tailored narrowly to the trapezoid of his torso, cuffs rolled just so, the hint of a bronzed and muscled forearm. He delivers sly jokes and engages in patter with shopkeepers in a mix of Italian and English...His suave exterior shows cracks only in moments of sensory ecstasy. Taking a deep whiff of a split wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano, or letting the funk of a ribbon of prosciutto blossom on his tongue, he moans, he sighs, he murmurs. The whole thing verges on obscene: Tuccissimo."