Welcome back, culture vultures and warriors alike, to my little corner of The Free Press. This week: an ode to Stanley Tucci, who might save food culture with his new show; the greatest bit of public art I have ever encountered; and Jon Hamm is playing the Robin Hood of swanky Connecticut.

Mr. Tucci Goes to Italy

I thought we had enough shows in which middle-aged American men, who fancy themselves gourmands, travel, eat things, and talk about it: Phil Rosenthal, Guy Fieri, Anthony Bourdain. It’s been done.

Then I watched Stanley Tucci’s new show—unfortunately and blandly titled, Tucci in Italy—out this week from National Geographic, and was pleasantly surprised. We see him winding, at ease, through the streets of Florence ordering a tripe sandwich for breakfast—that’s the stomach lining of a cow for the uninitiated—or eating dry-aged steak and sipping red wine in southernmost Tuscany with Italian cowboys called butteri. “Well, that looks good,” Tucci says with a smile when presented with his first sip of the show, a Negroni, which he enjoys alfresco. “And it tastes good, too.”

It’s all very watchable. Tucci has the lifestyle of a rich and famous man—he’s an actor first; food is to him what pigeon racing is to Mike Tyson—but he’s showing that his recipe for life can be modified. You may not get the chance to go to Italy this summer, but you could probably make a Negroni. Why not drink it outside? Or at least, open a window.

Compare Tucci’s pleasing show—with its light history, interviews with locals, demonstrations of ancient meat-curing techniques, and slow pace—with the show whose high it’s chasing, the one that launched a million travel shows like it. I’m talking, of course, about Bourdain’s No Reservations, and its later incarnation on CNN, Parts Unknown.

Bourdain came up in New York restaurants in the ’90s, exploded in popularity with his book Kitchen Confidential, and became the world-traveling, bad-boy punk chef of the early aughts. He treated ordering a bowl of soup like a search-and-rescue mission. He got tattooed on air. He swallowed a cobra heart that was still beating. His brand was so ascendant that even Barack Obama, then the president of the United States, participated—sharing bún chả and beer in Hanoi with Bourdain, yukking it up about foreign policy and which foods it’s acceptable to put ketchup on. All while sitting on a plastic stool. Dessert on No Reservations was always the same, and it was shaking your head over imperialism...