Thanks for the interesting read!
Maize came to Italy (and the rest of the Old World) from the Americas as part of the Columbian Exchange, but not all the related knowledge and customs came with it.
A diet centred on simple maize actually leeches nutrients out of the body, hence vitamin deficiency diseases like pellagra.
People in America had for millennia treated maize with a process called nixtamalization (simmering in an alkaline solution), which changes the maize’s properties, increases its nutritional value and prevents pellagra. People took the crop around the world but crucially not this process (or least, it didn’t “stick”; people decided they didn’t like the changed flavour and didn’t bother with it).
So people outside of the Americas, like those in the Veneto (the mainland region by Venice), suffered health problems despite their full bellies. (This also happened among poor non-native people in the southern United States, who also had a diet heavy in maize but also no knowledge or custom of nixtamalization.)
I live in Mexico, in the state of Puebla, not far from where maize was domesticated and nixtamalization invented. I’m also not far from a town called Chipilo, where people speak… Venetian.
Because in the late 19th century, Venetians chose to emigrate away from the unnixtamalized maize- & pellagra-induced poverty in their homeland… and ended up in the place where maize and nixtamalization came from and never suffered pellagra again, and became prosperous.
