Resident in England since 1949, she has been influential in raising the country’s awareness of Italian cuisine: her 1976 Portrait of Pasta has been described as ‘the instrumental force in leading [the English] beyond the land of spag bol, macaroni cheese and tinned ravioli’.
[2] Del Conte was born in 1925 into a prosperous and cultured Milanese family; her father was a stockbroker and Anglophile, while her mother, with whom she had a tempestuous relationship, was of ‘good aristocratic stock’.
After spending a part of the war years in Emilia-Romagna – where twice she was arrested on suspicion of involvement with the partisans, and where she was strafed by Allied fighter aircraft while cycling on a county road – the family returned to Milan.
An adaptation of Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook for a British readership followed and in 1984 The Gastronomy of Italy, an encyclopædic work covering the topic from the Roman period to the present for which she was awarded the Duchessa Maria Luigia di Parma prize.
It was proposed to the President by the Italian Ambassador, Giancarlo Aragona, and the honour was given in recognition of the importance of Anna Del Conte's work in keeping alive Italy's good image in the UK.