Da Vinci’s Kitchen: A Secret History of Italian Cuisine (BenBella Books, January 2007) by Dave Dewitt, bestselling author of several cookbooks, takes a fresh approach do the artist’s life and to food in Renaissance Italy. “Reading several of his biographies triggered a ‘where’s the food?’ response in me as a food writer,” the author claims, “and prompted me to study his notebooks to find the food reference in them.”