If you’ve seen Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy series, you might’ve caught the man himself waxing lyrical about a seemingly humble dish of spaghetti with courgettes – or zucchini to the Italians. In a picture-postcard scene, Stanley samples the dish at a cliffside restaurant with views of the sea, before confidently claiming it’s “one of the best things he’s ever eaten”. The dish in question? That’d be spaghetti alla Nerano.
Spaghetti alla Nerano is a dish of pasta, fried courgettes and cheese that hails from the southern Italian region of Campania. More specifically, the dish’s origins can be traced back to one woman and one Campanian village. That woman is Maria Grazia, who created the dish at her namesake restaurant, Mariagrazia, in 1952. Hidden away in the picturesque fishing village of Nerano, on the sun-kissed Amalfi coast, the restaurant (and the recipe) have been passed down the generations – and both are still going strong today.
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