You might nibble on it while chatting to your fellow diners, even loop some prosciutto around it if you're feeling snazzy. But the Italian breadstick rarely seems to be the centre of attention. Rather than a mere culinary afterthought, legend has it that the invention of this humble stretched out dough was devised with a clear purpose, and even had political consequences.
In the late 17th century, the duke Vittorio Amedeo II di Savoia was born in the city of Turin, in the northwestern Italian region of Piedmont. Legend has it that as a child, the duke was constantly ill.
This worried his family as he was to succeed his father as the ruler of the state. The family tried all sorts of methods to cure him, from religious to physical, but it appeared that he simply could not keep his food down. Suffering from malnutrition and with a weak, defenceless body, he also became victim to a number of other ailments.
His father died and Vittorio again fell ill. His mother called in the best doctor she could find, the court physician Don Baldo Pecchio, who attributed the young duke's poor health to little more than recurrent food poisoning caused by unhygienic, under-baked bread. Kitchen hygiene in those times was rudimentary at best.
The doctor, having suffered from similar conditions as a child, empathised and remembered his mother baking him small shards of leavened dough into a very light, crumbly and crisp bread. He asked the court baker Antonio Brunero to come up with something that had these qualities.
The baker worked from the dough he had prepared for ghersa, a long loaf that was one of the most common local breads at the time. He pulled and rolled it into even thinner, longer strips that cooked thoroughly into crisp, golden rods. These mini ghersa became known as ghersin, then grissino.