Friday, February 10th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Hey, random internet louts, I gotta question: why demand a sandwich when you could instead have Sophia Loren make you a pizza?
This photo is all over Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Imgur, and a thousand social photoshare sites you’ve never even heard of. Which poses a considerable challenge to an intrepid provenance researcher like your not-so-humble reporter, because “Woot, Sophia Loren making pizza!” is emphatically not an attribution. However, I may be up to the challenge. Machine translation of this page seems to attribute the photo to Loren’s 1971 cookbook In Cucina Con Amore, which makes enough sense to be entirely believable.
The book is still available in many editions and languages — can anybody with a copy confirm that this photo appears in it?
UPDATE: After a helpful commenter Alexandra confirmed the photo did not appear in at least one edition of the cookbook, two different people independently took up this research challenge and triumphantly gnawed it into submission, getting us both a “photo not after” date of May 1955 and a “likely first place of publication” in a British magazine. Both Lena in the ErosBlog comments and Chloe Luv on Twitter found this picture that was shot in the same kitchen and photoshoot:
What’s more, they both identified it as the cover photo from the May 14, 1955 edition of the British magazine Illustrated containing a feature called “Sophia’s Pizza Pie”:
I am delighted beyond words that two different people reacted to my incomplete (and somewhat wrong) results from a hasty ten minutes of research and decided to do the job correctly. Thanks so much!
It turns out there’s at least one copy of this magazine available for sale on the internet. It’s one of my dreams (if-and-when the ErosBlog Patreon really takes off) to be able to follow up finds like this by ordering the paper artifact and making complete scans available for my readers, for my patrons, and for our digital posterity. But I can’t afford that sort of expenditures yet, so in the meanwhile, if anybody wants to procure that magazine and send it to me, I’d be happy to scan it on a “loaner” basis and return the paper artifact to its rightful owner.
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