In the second season of Tucci In Italy, Stanley Tucci visits Naples and the Campania region, Sicily, Le Marche, Sardinia and Veneto. In all of those regions, he concentrates on talking to chefs, food experts, farmers and others that continue the culinary traditions of one of Europe’s most culinarily-oriented countries.

TUCCI IN ITALY SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “‘See Naples and die.’ So said Goethe in the 1700s.” Stanley Tucci stands in front of a tomb that contains neatly stacked human skulls and bones. “Many people took him literally. Forty thousand of them are buried in the catacombs underneath the city.”

The Gist: Tucci has visited some of the Season 2 destinations in past episodes of this series and his old CNN series, Stanley Tucci: Searching For Italy, but each region has multiple episodes’ worth of food culture to explore.

Take the first episode, where he visits the city of Naples and other spots in the Campania region. He doesn’t talk about the city’s most famous food export, Neopolitan pizza, in this episode because he covered that in his CNN series. Here, he goes to Mimì alla Ferrovia, a restaurant that has been open for over 80 years, to have another famous Neopolitan export: eggplant parmigiana. But it doesn’t look like the breaded, cheese-covered parmigiana you see in the U.S.; it’s a layered dish, with thin slices of eggplant acting like lasagna noodles.

Naples is close to Mount Vesuvius, and Tucci emphasizes how the cities and towns at the foot of the volcano have a bit of a devil-may-care viewpoint, given that Vesuvius could blow at any time. He goes to the town of Gragnano, known for its dried pasta, and eats a pasta dish that is cooked in a huge pan with moss-covered ocean rocks. He then goes to the island of Procida and sees the “bread lemons” that are grown there.

At a tomato farm in Ercolado, he talks to the co-owner, an immigrant who went on strike to improve the pay and conditions farm laborers were working under. In Paestum, in the southern part of the region, he finds out why buffalo mozzarella and other buffalo milk products are so revered. Finally, in the Benevento province in the northern part of the region, he talks to two vineyard owners who have created a revered white wine from a grape varietal that used to be considered too bitter.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Aside from the aforementioned Stanley Tucci: Searching For Italy, Tucci In Italy is very much in the vein of other food-oriented travel shows, like Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown or Taste The Nation With Padma Lakshmi.

Our Take: We’ve come around a bit on Stanley Tucci as a travel show host. On both of his Italy-based series, we criticized how detached he was, and how he didn’t really connect with the people he talked to. But we’ve come to realize that it’s a feature of his style, not a bug, though we did wish at times he was a bit warmer of an on-screen presence.

You can definitely see Tucci’s passion for Italy, his ancestral home and where he and his family lived for a few years when he was a kid, and how the food culture permeates how Italians live, work and relate to each other. And the fact that he can converse with people in Italian helps show his connection to the settings he’s in, because he’s not speaking to people through an interpreter or on-camera fixer.

We’re particularly looking forward to episodes where he brings on his wife, Felicity Blunt. Seeing the two of them together makes Tucci look more human and down-to-earth. But one other thing that makes him more down-to-earth is how he eats.

Hear us out on this one! Tucci takes huge bites of food when he tastes chefs’ creations; he loads his fork up with a huge twirl of spaghetti more than once. When he tries a buffalo cheese-heavy dish in Paestum, his mouth is covered in cheese. As erudite and detached as Tucci can seem, it’s heartening to see him have no compunction to making a mess of eating on camera.

Performance Worth Watching: Given how we seemed to have affection for the way Tucci eats, we’ll give this to him.

Sex And Skin: Besides sexy food shots, there’s nothing.

Parting Shot: Loving shots of Naples and the area around Mt. Vesuvius. “The fact that Campania’s food is eaten all over the world is a sign that great challenges can yield great results.”

Sleeper Star: The loving shots of Campania are thanks to Matt Ball, the show’s director of photography.

Most Pilot-y Line: Trying to figure out Tucci’s tells about whether he really loves a dish or not, we think we’ve figured it out: If he says, “Wow!” he really loved it. If he says, “It’s amazing,” he probably only liked it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’ve recommended Tucci’s travel shows in the past more for the visuals and the passion he brings than any particular connection he has to the people he visits. But the second season of Tucci In Italy made us realize what Tucci is actually connecting with is the food and culture, and that helps us like him better.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.