When he returned to his hometown, he took over his father's business, making quite a bit of money, but the lives of the Artusi family were permanently disrupted by the arrival in Forlimpopoli on January 25, 1851, of the outlaw Stefano Pelloni, nicknamed il Passatore, "the Ferryman".
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.