Shifting our attention from the human figure to that meat, a material substance that instils unease through the rawness of its details and its closeness to the person, the disembowelled carcass shows what is missing from the quarters depicted: precisely the "quinto quarto", as everything edible among the innards is called in our culinary tradition; that is, the whole set of offal made up of the internal organs, or viscera, of animals: liver, brain, kidney, stomach, heart, spleen, lung. To these should be added the so-called animelle (pancreas, thymus and salivary glands), similar in texture and chemical composition.

«Offal is the humoral part of the animal, where it challenges man in all his facets. From the sweetness of the sweetbread to the toughness of the tripe, up to the acrid character of the kidney, passing from the softness of the brain to the tenacity of the heart»

Frattaglia and rigaglia (a set of innards): the first carries the pejorative suffix (-aglia), which curiously contrasts with the original etymon of the second: rigaglia in fact comes from "regalia", the portion set aside for the king or the head huntsman as a gift, hence a choice portion, or in any case a significant one, for its intrinsic and symbolic weight.
Our sugo di rigaglie, typical of Sundays for pastasciutta, risotto or meatballs, showed the chicken's guts gently braided rather than cut, perhaps also in order to prepare them to be eaten separately, as an "umido".
Between definition and description, following a centuries-old gastronomic trail, it is well known that offal is the basis for some of the most widespread street foods. In Palermo, for instance, the pane con la milza, the spleen sandwich (called "pani ca' meusa"), while the frittola consists of little pieces of meat, fat and gristle; in Florence, lampredotto and tripe. Many other street delicacies remain the exclusive preserve of the truly devoted: musso (beef muzzle), peri (foot), scannaruzzatu (oesophagus), pig's trotters (carcagnola), strifizzi, testa di quagliata and centopelli, parts of the soft intestine and of the upper stomach, which make up the so-called quarume (or caldume).
Umbria in turn, like other regions, has a skilful way of treating and eating offal. Coratella (liver, lungs, heart) – Pagliata (shared with Lazio, where it is pajata) or calf's intestines – Trecciola, the intestines of young lamb – Trippa, from different parts of the stomach, one of which, the prized millefoglie, is by now almost impossible to find – Animelle – Brain, Schienali (spinal cord), Tongue, kidneys and other soft "salvaged" parts.
On feast days or gatherings, but above all on market days, one finds in fixed spots vans or small kiosks selling Porchetta, a whole pig roasted in the oven with herbs; every village has slight variants in its preparation and cooking, as a rule in a wood-fired oven. In bread or inside fragrant wrappings, it is eaten together with the innards, black with pepper, herbs and juices that fill it; these are delicacies for connoisseurs, along with cicotto, which sublimates all the gelatinous and waste parts (trotters, snout, ears, tail) through skilful cooking, and is usually prepared and sold separately.
We may consider the culinary use of blood consistent with this context too, both because it is a food of recovery or
even of waste, and because of its character akin to the internal parts.
Of archaic flavour and homemade craft is the Sanguinaccio, a kind of sweet salame, now almost vanished, obtained from pig's blood variously mixed with walnuts, almonds, raisins, sugar and cooked wine. A detail not to be overlooked: a delicacy very similar to this is the only dish described with any precision in the Odyssey.
Their symbolic value in rituals is intense; to touch on it briefly: the propitiatory one in the Hellenic world that mixes blood, milk and honey before practices of divination and contact with the beyond; Ulysses performs it, on Circe's advice, to reveal the course and the purpose of his wandering.
The Etruscan bronze liver in the Museum of Cortona recalls the age-old ritual of divination, like those depicted on ancient artefacts; it stands to the one destined for consumption (whole or in sections) in a differently symbolic measure from the butcher's shops that display it hanging on hooks together with the other offal.
They really do seem like crudities too visible, explicit bloody signs that become food after careful working and cooking (sanguetto, sanguinaccio, mazzafegata). In our times they appear as questionable preparations for gastronomic and culinary habits that have been normalised, and yet they reveal refinements of taste and surprising flavours.
It is worth noting, in fact, that culinary use and taste have given the parts a nomenclature that sounds affectionate and gentle, as if almost to soften the evocative, repulsive power of the innards: animelle, coratella, sanguetto, as against darker definitions that certainly cannot dispel the sharp power of the primary ingredient: blood.
That of the pig, a beast that requires an adequate and powerful killing, especially in the ancient practice of "scannamento", or throat-cutting (a term still in use), the blood, as we were saying, offers an image of grim abundance and was used to supplement the diet, all the more so in poor and deprived economies, achieving the complete consumption of the animal.
It enters as a protagonist, with the dark hues of the gut, into the mazzafegato[1] or mazzafegata and into the sanguinaccio already mentioned, all packed in the form of a sausage, larger or smaller, refined with grapes, pine nuts, sugar or sharp pepper. The so-called sanguetto, on the other hand, a dish now forgotten, is the one made from chicken, a humble and lowly regarded little creature; collected and immediately set in hot water, it was then cut into chunks and cooked in a pan with a dressing of aromatics for a frugal meal.
The gastronomic scene evokes other scenarios: what lies within is put on show, what is deemed waste enters the litany of culinary traditions. Here, then, is offal: immodest displays of flesh sacrificed and put up for sale, a minority object of desire in the practice of buying and of consumption, whether domestic or public, following the rules of a course that becomes a telltale of practices and cultures, from the street to the taverns.
The pale, livid colour, or else the dark and blood-red one, a visual perception so visceral that it offers no escape from "what remains" of a killing. It is not the inanimate that shows itself but precisely the dismembered, the outcome of an act that takes life away.
The hidden vital part that reveals/disembowels itself appears disquieting to the eye, and the innards are the most hidden of things and therefore the most intolerable to look upon.
They have liquid, indistinct textures and shifting shapes: guts, sweetbreads, brain, liver, spleen, lungs, pancreas, stomach. The display ritual of the sale calls for safekeeping and sealed packaging, while, hung up once cooked, they now survive only as 'street food', celebrated in recent times by a fashionable, global gloss that has certainly held back their disappearance, without, however, wholly freeing them from the idea of the fare of social limitation, relegated to the popular sphere, tinged with the revulsion of their origin (shape and colour), far from the aseptic portion of meat, cut and packaged and put up for sale, which certainly does not call to mind the living creature and the ethical and practical implications of its rearing and slaughter.
One should at least reflect that where the whole of the meat is eaten, an ethics of consumption is in fact affirmed, and thus a form of respect for the sacrifice of the animal; to eat all its parts, to do away with the waste of a preference for portions not by chance called "noble", or canonical cuts, strengthens a good practice in the use of food resources; on the contrary, the system of rearing, killing, packaging and selling, and thus of serial, industrial, aseptic consumption, by decreeing offal repulsive and unsuitable, makes it less appealing and consequently brings about a modest demand on the consumer's part.
Where blood and matter reside, there the shadow of life branded by death persists. This is the residual force of the scandal: what remains of a killing. It is necessary to pass through it in order to recognise it, whereas with its oblivion or removal it becomes possible to regard the slaughtered animal as an inert product, organised and processed in the central rite of the modern ways of use.
The society of wellbeing must remove, on many counts, every suspicion of malaise; meat, and animal flesh above all, rid of the scruples of any spiritualism, lends itself to the enactment of use and consumption in these mass forms; yet not even the age of demythologising manages to erase the ancient symbolic rituals of killing and of the related dietary and cultic practice. Such rituals survive in the tenacity of culinary and social traditions through local customs, in the family habits of festivities and of seasonal practices (the winter season with the pig, Easter with the lamb, summer with the goose in the dog days of the harvest).
In this wake, the poverty of the ingredients and the richness of the preparations come to mingle; the now acclaimed tastiness of the thousand regional recipes offers to the eye and to the memory the evocation of certain celebratory frescoes: redundant still lifes arranged like those processions crowded with deities, chariots, clouds and fantastic animals that converge towards a centre, a coat of arms or a figure, where everyone rushes to celebrate not the glory "of the House of Salina" but the humble, yet succulent, glory of Offal, itself the glory of the wisdom of the table and of life.

Notes

[1] Mazzafegato, (a pork sausage with a percentage of pig's liver): when one speaks of mazzafegato one is referring to sausages made by adding pig's liver to the normal mixture, very tasty, prepared with a different content of salt and aromatics, whence the sweet or savoury designation. The name has two possible origins. The first seems to derive from "mezzo fegato" (half a liver), indicating the percentage of it present in the mixture. The other might point to the term ammazzafegato, precisely to underline the fact that this is not a delicate product but a robust dish.

Angela Margaritelli works at the Study Centre of the Teatro Stabile dell'Umbria. An expert in the performing arts, she has long been engaged in artistic and cultural promotion and outreach.