Franco Romagnoli, master of cuisine, many other arts
In the hands of Franco Romagnoli, gnocchi dough magically transformed into balls the size of walnuts, which he set on a baking sheet to age for a few moments en route to the oven.
"In Rome," he told the Globe in 2003 as he prepared a meal, "there is a saying: 'Smile, smile! Your mother is making gnocchi.' "
But for those who watched his TV show "Romagnoli's Table" in the 1970s or dined at his restaurant in the '80s, Mr. Romagnoli's presence brought smiles, even as his food elicited murmurs of contentment. And yet there was more to him than met the taste buds. Mr. Romagnoli may have introduced multitudes to the cooking he learned growing up in Rome, but he was also a writer, a sculptor, a filmmaker, and a photographer.
Mr. Romagnoli, whose deft hand in the kitchen and delicious accent made him a celebrity to those who wanted to prepare authentic Italian food, died Monday in Brigham and Women's Hospital of complications of a kidney illness. He was 82 and lived in Watertown.
With his wife, Margaret, who died in 1995, he hosted a television show on WGBH in Boston that went national, bringing into American kitchens Italian meals that transcended pizza and spaghetti.
"I think the thing that was very nice about their show was they were very different from each other," said Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, a food historian and author who is honorary curator of the culinary collection at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge.
Margaret Romagnoli, said Wheaton, "was very much an American, and he was very much an Italian. They had this really dynamic relationship, and it played out on the television set. They were introducing ordinary Americans who had no experience with real Italian food to the possibilities, and it was really opening a door on something most of us weren't aware of. It was a real pleasure to watch."
Culling recipes they popularized on their PBS show, the couple wrote "The Romagnolis' Table" and other cookbooks. In the late 1970s, they opened Romagnoli's Table, a Faneuil Hall restaurant that served everyone from their fans to the likes of Seiji Ozawa and Paul Newman, until they sold the place in 1989.
While their food was celebrated, the Romagnolis used a down-to-earth approach to preparing meals.
"So many cookbooks are snobbish," Mr. Romagnoli told the Globe in 1975. "And so many add ingredients that shouldn't be there. They take a simple dish and ruin it by trying to embellish it."
With one foot in Boston and the other in Mr. Romagnoli's boyhood home of Rome, the couple traveled back and forth and found their kitchen skills in demand on both sides of the Atlantic, though sometimes for different culinary approaches.
"In Italy," Mr. Romagnoli told the Globe in 1989, after announcing they would cease being restaurateurs, "all our friends want us to cook American. What do they like? Pancakes, waffles, chowders, turkey, baked ham."
Margaret Romagnoli died in 1995, and three years later Mr. Romagnoli married Gwen O'Sullivan, an attorney who previously had lived in Rome, not far from the abode he and Margaret kept in the city. Their respective children, the couple realized, had frequented the same gelato shop.
"Only much later did we realize that our paths had crossed so many times in Rome and here," his wife said. "When we went back to Italy, we found out that we each had old friends who were mutual friends."
With Gwen Romagnoli, he wrote "Italy, the Romagnoli Way: A Culinary Journey." Mr. Romagnoli also published "A Thousand Bells at Noon," an insider's look at Rome. "The Bicycle Runner," his memoir of joining the resistance in Italy during World War II, is scheduled to be published next year, his wife said.
Gian Franco Romagnoli grew up in Rome and was the son of an architect who designed train stations throughout Italy. Rather than allow himself to be drafted during World War II, Mr. Romagnoli escaped to join the resistance in the Apennine Mountains in Italy, near where an uncle had a vineyard.
After the war, he was a cameraman in a Rome film studio when Margaret O'Neill arrived one day. She was working on educational films for the Marshall Plan at the end of the 1940s and, more importantly, was his boss. They married in 1952 and moved to the United States; US government rules prohibited women in the Foreign Service from marrying foreigners.
WGBH-TV hired Mr. Romagnoli to open its film department, and he also shot photographs of some of the luminaries who passed through the station.
"One of the treats for us kids was to be in the darkroom with my father," said his daughter, Anna O'Neill Romagnoli of Queens, N.Y. "He'd put the pictures in the tray, and they'd magically appear. He shot some amazing portraits of people, from Odetta to Robert Frost."
Indeed, she added, "I do feel sorry when the cooking eclipses everything else, because there were many sides to him. If you see his house, it's full of his art - his photos, his sculptures, his paintings. He had the heart of an artist."
"Franco has a lot of artistic talent that people don't know about," his wife said. "There are so many other facets of him that people who know him might call him a Renaissance man."
To his children, Mr. Romagnoli gave a taste for travel and a love of words. Everyone in the household spoke more than one language. He also stressed the importance of conviviality.
"He was a lucky man, and he had a lot friends," said his son Paulo of Watertown.
The best example of Mr. Romagnoli's luck may be what made him famous.
"They were stone broke in 1972; that's how the food thing came about," Anna Romagnoli said of her parents. "Not only were they stone broke, but there was no good Italian food to eat in Boston. They started a wave; there's no question about it. They started a whole new world of Italian cooking in Boston."
In addition to his wife, daughter Anna, and son Paulo, Mr. Romagnoli leaves two other sons, Gian of Neshkoro, Wis., and Marco of Corinth, Vt.; a stepson, Sean O'Sullivan of Columbus, Ohio; a sister, Mirella Cristofori of Rome; two granddaughters; two grandsons; a stepgrandson; and a stepgranddaughter.
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on Feb. 1 in the Bigelow Chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. 