Italian cuisine is widely popular for its pasta, pizza, desserts like tiramisu, and much more. Out of 800,000 restaurants in the United States, a whopping 100,000 serve Italian food, but if you want to dive deeper into Italian food straight from Italy, you should know about the Tuscan ancestor to a the widely-known classic bruschetta.

Bruschetta traditionally consists of slices of toasted bread topped with fresh tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and basil. However, bruschetta started out as a dish called fettunta, which consists of a roasted slice of bread that is drizzled with olive oil, rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with salt; this might sound like plain out garlic bread, but it's not.

Fettunta dates back to the Ancient Romans, and its name means “oily slice”; it's commonly eaten in November, when new batches of olive oil need to be sampled, and the salt and garlic are actually optional. The dish evolved into bruschetta when cooks began adding other ingredients, such as cheese, olives, anchovies, mushrooms, and pork.