Stanley Tucci wants to cook together

I remember standing in my kitchen alone, elbows dusted with flour, watching a dozen strangers knead dough on Zoom. We were all there for a pandemic-era sourdough class, gamely folding and shaping in our separate homes. It was oddly intimate, weirdly funny and kind of moving. Still, I kept thinking: I wish we were all in one big kitchen together.

Which is probably why a scene from the new season of “Tucci in Italy” caught in my throat a little. Stanley Tucci travels to Villa San Sebastiano, a small town in Abruzzo that had been rebuilt from the rubble of a landslide in the 1950s. As Tucci explains, after the church, the first thing the villagers rebuilt was their communal bread oven — the place where, for generations, everything had revolved around bread.

“This place helped rebuild the community after the landslide, but gradually convenience culture meant that those traditional methods fell out of favor,” Tucci notes in his voiceover. “Eventually the bread oven closed, taking the social heart of the village with it — until Lucia came along.”