TV Review: "Tucci in Italy" Season 2 Is as Irresistible as Ever

There are very few television hosts working today who could sustain a series built almost entirely around the pleasure of watching them eat. Stanley Tucci is one of them. The Academy Award nominee returns for a second season of Tucci in Italy, visiting five new regions — Naples and Campania, Sicily, Le Marche, Sardinia, and Veneto — and the results are every bit as warm, curious, and transportive as the first outing.

The show is a natural fit for National Geographic in a way that feels engineered. Tucci is bilingual, which means a substantial portion of each episode plays out in Italian with subtitles. Rather than creating distance, this deepens the sense of authentic cultural immersion. The series operates simultaneously as travelogue, culinary history, and regional anthropology, and that layering is where it earns its keep. Each episode works its way through the food of a given region while weaving in ruins, mythology, and centuries of history. A meal is never just a meal here; it's an entry point into how a place came to be.

The Sicily episode is a strong example of that approach at its best. The island's cuisine reflects layer upon layer of outside influence — Greek, Arab, Tunisian — and Tucci traces each thread with genuine enthusiasm. But what gives the episode a distinct identity is its engagement with something more elemental: the shadow of Mount Etna. The volcano's constant, looming threat has shaped Sicilian culture in ways that go beyond geography, and the episode finds that anxiety embedded in the food and the people who make it.

The Sardinia episode may be the season's most timely. National Geographic itself helped popularize the concept of Blue Zones — geographic pockets of unusual longevity — and Sardinia was among the most celebrated. This episode gently revises that narrative, engaging with updated research that complicates the dietary mythology that grew up around those communities. It's a rare moment of a network course-correcting its own received wisdom, handled with curiosity rather than embarrassment.

Across the season, there are quieter pleasures too. In Naples, Tucci encounters a dish so extraordinary that he does something almost unheard of in the polished grammar of food television: he turns the camera on his own crew and insists they try it on the spot. It's a small, spontaneous moment, but it captures something true about how Tucci operates — he doesn't perform delight, he shares it.

For viewers who have never seen the show, the good news is that no homework is required. Each episode functions as a self-contained portrait of its region, and Season 2 is as welcoming an entry point as Season 1. It's also, practically speaking, one of the better trip-planning resources on streaming right now. Tucci regularly visits restaurants, markets, and landmarks that are open to the public, and that specificity — the named trattoria, the exact hillside town — gives the series a usefulness that outlasts the viewing experience.

I give Tucci in Italy Season 2 five out of five stars.

The season premiere airs May 11th at 9/8c on National Geographic. All episodes of Tucci in Italy Season 2 stream May 12th on Disney+ and Hulu.