In a white-tablecloth restaurant in Naples, a man sits with a little pesto left on his plate. He does not ask permission. He tears off a piece of bread, wipes the plate clean and eats with what a witness calls an uninhibited enthusiasm, and in that small motion there is a message: this food is good, and good food should not be abandoned. The witness is Giulia Crouch, a British food journalist raised on her Italian grandmother’s thick-cut bread, and she tells the story of the gesture’s long rehabilitation in the BBC’s travel pages. The gesture has a name. Fare la scarpetta — to do the little shoe.
For something so ordinary, the name carries a heavy crowd of theories. The piece of bread looks like a small shoe, some say. Others say it speaks of a hunger so deep a person would eat the sole of a shoe. Luca Cesari, an Italian food historian, waves both away: the origin is uncertain, and the more fanciful online theories should be set aside. What has survived is paper. The earliest written example he has found dates to 1871, in Roman dialect, when a character in the Roman magazine La Frusta asks to make a scarpetta with a little sauce left on the plate. The expression appears again in an 1885 dictionary of the Abruzzo dialect — roots, it seems, in the centre of the peninsula.
The most convincing reading of the word, Cesari says, comes from the Accademia della Crusca, the supreme guardian of the Italian language: in central dialect, fare una scarpetta meant to go for a little walk. The bread, strolling around the plate. It is a lovely thought, and it smells faintly of a nation that prefers its metaphors to amble rather than march.
A map drawn in manners
Ask whether the scarpetta is polite, and Italy answers with its usual unity — which is to say, with four different answers. Francesca Cipolla, a food creator from Palermo, calls it a reflex: there is delicious sauce, she tears off bread, she does not think about it; everyone in her family is the same. Gaia Enria, a chef who grew up in formal Turin, remembers being told off for it: it was viewed as improper there, though times, she says, have changed. In Puglia, chef Somaia Hammad remembers almost the opposite — leaving food behind could nearly be considered rude, and finishing every last bit with bread is about appreciation as much as not wasting.
And in Calabria, the toe of the boot, bread was something more than bread. Francesco Mazzei, chef of Mezzogiorno in London, recalls that everything else on the table was merely companatico — literally, what you eat with bread. The meal had not begun if there was no bread, and it could not end without it either. Where a Roman sees manners and a Turinese sees impropriety, a Calabrian saw a small religion.
The real divide
Cesari cautions that the line runs through class as much as geography. Bourgeois etiquette frowned on touching food with the hands, and even the shy compromise — break the bread, spear it with a fork, push it discreetly around the plate — could be considered boorish. Perhaps more so, he notes, because it betrayed “someone who would like to follow etiquette but just can’t resist.” There is no shame like the shame of the half-transgressor; the man who wipes the plate openly is at least honest about his desires.
Attitudes shifted broadly in the second half of the 20th century, Cesari says, as Italy rediscovered its cucina povera and began to think of waste as the real bad manners. A symbolic turning point came in 2015, when Gualtiero Marchesi — the father of modern Italian fine dining — defended the scarpetta in an interview with Gente magazine, calling it perfectly acceptable, even elegant, as long as it was done with the fingers, with nonchalance. When the high priest of the tasting menu blesses the bread in the sauce, the war is over.
Now the habit is everywhere. It does not matter, says Cipolla, whether it is a fancy restaurant, a local trattoria or a bar that does food — bread comes for this purpose and stays until the end of the meal. In Naples, a takeaway pasta place called ‘A Scarpetta designs every box to leave enough sauce for the final mop-up. In Enria’s telling the gesture is now not only accepted but respected, because it communicates so much: “You want to scoop up every last drop because you enjoyed it so much.”
Mazzei says the word has even escaped the table. Asked how a holiday was, an Italian might answer ci farei la scarpetta — I’d do a scarpetta to it. I wish there were more of it. Perhaps that is the truest measure of a civilisation: what it does with the last of the sauce. As Cesari puts it: “Leaving something delicious on the plate would be a far worse crime than mopping it up with a piece of bread.”