In point of fact, he avoids going to Italian restaurants in the Netherlands. “They have absolutely nothing to do with Italian food. Usually they overdo it. Italian cuisine – Neapolitan cooking in particular – uses few ingredients, but they’re always good and fresh. It all starts with good olive oil. If I want to eat good Italian food here, I cook it myself. I have to make do with local products, though, which can be difficult. In Italy you can buy fresh pasta; here you can’t, and making it yourself takes time, which I rarely have. That said, the meat here is better than the meat in Naples. And I adapt my recipes: Neapolitan cuisine doesn’t use asparagus and mushrooms, but I do use them here.”

His earliest food memory is being served pasta with cauliflower in school. “I hated it, but I had to eat it. I was always desperately looking for places where I could secretly throw it away. I still shudder to think of it. When I was young, everyone in Italy ate a full hot meal for both lunch and dinner. Pasta as a primo, meat or fish as a secondo and something sweet or fruit for dessert. Lunch was provided by the school.” He laughs: “The sandwiches my 11-year-old son takes to school here would’ve been considered a crime.”

On the menu

Formisano lived with his parents and older brother on the outskirts of Naples. His mother was a general practitioner and his father a university professor. “My mother ran a large practice, so she often started cooking before heading out in the morning. I’d wake up to the delicious smells of whatever was on the menu that day. In Naples, each weekday has a set meal. We’d eat pasta with beans on Mondays, gnocchi on Thursdays, fish on Fridays.”

As his parents led busy lives, he and his brother learnt to cook at a young age. “I learnt by watching my mother and grandmother, and by listening to them chat about how to prepare different foods. That’s the best way to learn: playfully.” He usually cooks Italian food; it’s what he does best. “Sometimes I try a recipe from another cuisine, but I never know if it tastes the way it should. You can’t learn that from a cookbook.” He mostly sticks to pasta and fish dishes. “I’ve noticed my son has had enough of my pastas, although he’d never say so. He seems to prefer hamburgers and rice now. It’s very hurtful to me, of course”, he says with a grin.

Two sides to Naples

He associates his childhood in Naples with the ocean. “We had these long summer holidays. My grandmother looked after my brother and me in our house by the sea. I have wonderful memories of days full of sun and fresh fish. The sea, that’s what I miss here in Maastricht. Strolling down the boulevard on a winter’s day, because even then the weather was often nice.” When he thinks of Naples, sfogliatelle also come to mind: little shell-shaped pastries. “Sfogliatelle literally means ‘thin layers’. You can get them from any street stall in Naples, either soft or crunchy. As a native, you’re for either one type or the other. I prefer the crunchy ones. I love them, but they’re very difficult to make.”

There was a dark side to Naples too. Naturally, he knew about the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. Their existence had little impact on ordinary citizens, but the drugs they brought into the city did. In the 1980s, Naples was flooded with drugs. “Heroin in particular. It was bad – I lost friends to it. But other than that, Naples didn’t strike me as any more crime-ridden than any other big city, despite the image created by films like Gomorra. You knew where you could and couldn’t go and who you should and shouldn’t hang out with.”