Liguria

Liguria is roughly 350 kilometres of coastline and never more than 35 kilometres deep: the Maritime Alps and the Apennines drop straight into the sea. No plain means no pasture, and no pasture means almost no meat. To farm at all, Ligurians built terraces: in the Cinque Terre alone the dry stone walls run to thousands of kilometres if laid end to end. The result is a vegetable-led, preservation-minded kitchen, shaped as much by sailors as by farmers: where durum wheat was scarce they used chickpea flour, and where fat was scarce they used herbs.

Pesto is the clearest expression of that logic. Basilico Genovese DOP grows mainly in greenhouses at Pra', on the coast west of Genoa; the leaves are small and never develop the minty note basil picks up elsewhere. Traditionally it is pounded in a marble mortar with pine nuts, garlic, coarse salt, Sardinian pecorino, parmesan and Taggiasca olive oil. It goes with trofie or trenette, alongside potatoes and green beans, and it never touches heat.

The two halves of the coast differ. West of Genoa, towards France, the reference points are Taggiasca olives and their oil, violet artichokes and asparagus from Albenga, trumpet courgettes, the bitter chinotto citrus of Savona, and an audibly Provençal accent in the Rossese wine of Dolceacqua. East, towards La Spezia, you get mesciua (wheat, chickpeas and beans boiled together), salt-cured anchovies from Monterosso, and Sciacchetrà, a rare sweet wine from the Cinque Terre terraces. Inland, in the valleys behind, come chestnuts, mushrooms and the region's only real meat cooking.

Genoa adds a grammar of pies and batters. Farinata is chickpea batter baked in a copper pan in a wood oven until the top blisters. Focaccia genovese, a centimetre thick with dimples full of oil and brine, is eaten at nine in the morning, dipped in cappuccino, a local habit that startles other Italians. Focaccia di Recco is something else entirely: two paper-thin unleavened sheets with fresh stracchino cheese between them, eight minutes at 300°C. Then there is torta pasqualina, cappon magro (an elaborate tower of fish and vegetables on ship's biscuit) and pansoti filled with preboggion, a mix of wild greens picked in the fields, served in walnut sauce.