Art of Eating Well"). The title is clearly of a positivist bent; Artusi worshipped progress and the scientific method, which he used in his book. He was also an admirer of the physiologist Paolo Mantegazza. His book, in fact, can be considered a "scientifically tested" manual: every recipe was the result of trials and experiments. Writing only two decades after the unification of Italy, Artusi was the first to include recipes from all the different regions of Italy in a single cookbook. He is often credited with establishing a truly national Italian cuisine for the first time, and even the French cook Auguste Escoffier took inspiration from him. The case of minestrone and cholera Of particular interest is the story told by Artusi himself regarding a bad experience which occurred during the summer in Livorno in 1855, when Artusi came in contact with cholera, the infective disease that in that era took many lives in Italy. Once in Livorno, Artusi went to a restaurant to have dinner. After eating minestrone, he decided to rent a room in the building belonging to a man called Domenici. As Artusi would later recount, he spent the whole night suffering from horrible stomach pains, which he blamed on the minestrone he had eaten. The next day, returning to Florence, he got the news that Livorno had been hit by cholera and that Domenici had been a victim. It was only then that he realized what had happened: it had not been the minestrone that made him ill, but the early symptoms of the disease. The event inspired Artusi to write an excellent recipe for minestrone. Works There are three works by Artusi: two non-fiction books and a cooking manual. The non-fiction works, a biography of Ugo Foscolo and a critique of Giuseppe Giusti, went largely unnoticed and quickly went out of print. His manual, however, entitled La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, was much more successful. In 1891, at age 71, he completed his cookbook, but could not find a publisher. So he used his own money to self-publish, selling a thousand copies of the first edition in four years. Soon, however, the cookbook caught on, and before Artusi died, more than 200,000 copies had been sold. Filled with amusing anecdotes as well as recipes, the book is a perennial best seller in Italy, and has been translated into Spanish, French,