7 Vegetables Italians Do Best, and 20 Ways to Make Them

It's Italy Week! All week long, we're celebrating everything Italian and Italy-inspired: recipes, stories, and travel tips.

If you get stuck on the tomato when you think about Italian cooking, well, Italians do do the tomato really well.

But the Italian vegetable treatment goes well beyond the pomodoro: Italian cooks do a whole lot of vegetables—like broccoli rabe and cardoons and artichokes and cabbage and celery—better than just about anybody else, making them taste even more like themselves. (And when things come into season, they really celebrate them, with whole festivals devoted to fava beans and artichokes.) It's one of the things we love most about Italian cooking (maybe even more than the cheese. Well... maybe not).

Here are 20 recipes for cooking veg all'italiano:

Broccoli rabe:

Artichokes:

Olives:

Celery:

Mushrooms:

Cabbage:

Fennel: