Luigi Barzini Jr. was an Italian journalist, writer and politician most famous for his 1964 book The Italians, delving deeply into the Italian national character and introducing many Anglo-Saxon readers to Italian life and culture.
They eat the dainty food of gamous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman's octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach. - The Italians, 1964.
Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go unchanged, as deadly as before. - O America, 1977.