7 Commensality, Family, and Community Mangiare insieme è la base della famiglia. Eating together is the foundation o f the family Baldo Commensality and Relationships: “The table unites us” Forty-five-year-old Rinaldo, the father of two daughters, described what the family meant to him: Listen, here in Italy still, and I hope in other countries as well, the family is the starting point. It is the foundation. It is in the family where everyone finds support. It is the place where you can find help any time you are in need—whether it is a need for money or affection and security. I say the family has to be the foundation…. For us Italians, the family is important, very important. The family consisted of those one regularly ate with, and included the broader extended family at larger ritual meals for major holidays like New Year’s Day, Easter, and Christmas. 1 Seventy-five-year-old Massimo expressed his continuing closeness to his brother Renzo by saying, Today we still celebrate holidays together, Christmas and Easter always. Meals set boundaries between the family and outsiders. Marriage was cemented by the two families eating meals together again and again throughout the years. Commensality—literally sharing the table—was an important means of social connection, for it brought people together around the pleasurable act of eating. 2 Even though family size shrank greatly over the course of the twentieth century, Florentines in the 1980s still valued their families and insisted on eating together every day, even as they recognized that several forces including television, restaurants, and the rapid pace of work undermined commensal meals. While most families still ate both pranzo and cena together in the early 1980s, by 2003 the numbers who ate a big noon meal together had dwindled considerably, but many Florentines still reconstituted the family for cena as often as possible. The family was the place where Florentines expected to find emotional and financial support. It was closed to outsiders and meals established its boundaries. Sixty-one-year-old Marianna spoke of her family in the 1920s and 1930s: