Lorenza de’ Medici, Who Elevated Italian Cooking, Is Dead at 97

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Before Lorenza de’ Medici began publishing her cookbooks in the late 1980s, Italian cuisine outside of Italy was often considered unremarkable fare: red sauce, white sauce, pizza and pasta, all of which could be whipped up in haste from frozen, processed ingredients. But in books like “Italy the Beautiful Cookbook” (1988) and “The Renaissance of Italian Cooking” (1989), and later in her 13-part PBS show, “The de’ Medici Kitchen,” Ms. de’ Medici showed that Italian cooking could be something else entirely: light salads and soups, elegant preparations and, above all, fresh ingredients, ideally bought that morning from a local farmer. For those with enough money, she offered intimate one-day to one-week cooking courses at her family’s winery outside Florence, Badia a Coltibuono. Her students stayed in the estate’s thousand-year old complex, originally an abbey, in between lessons on things like how to pick the right vegetables, properly stuff potatoes and separate eggs by hand.