In a way it begins with the Crusades. Crusaders and pilgrims returning from the holy land had discovered the rich pleasures that spices introduce to food. They came back, principally through Venice, with this new taste for spice, and Venice grew rich on the spice trade.
What Venice had, Florence would have, and the Medicis invested heavily in the spice trade, growing even richer. Near the end of the 1400s, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean to Malabar and Calicut, exulting "For Christ and Spices!" and Italy soon had to share the spice trade with Portugal, and ultimately relinquish it.
It is considered the best thing that happened to Italian cooking, because cooks now had patrons with extremely developed palates accustomed to great pleasure - who still needed to be pleased. But now there was no multitude of spice to transform or alter the food. It was too costly not to use sparingly, and cooks fell back to the natural taste of the food, choosing the best ingredients where the flavors are strongest and most present, discovering the natural affinities of what complimented what, with only tiny amounts of spice to enhance what is naturally there.
Here endeth the lesson.
