For the Best Tuna Salad, Make It Italian-Style

When I lived as a student outside Florence, Italy, I was always on the lookout for great lunches that I could afford. We were fed dinner through my program (always pasta, always red sauce), but at lunch we were left to fend for ourselves. While I would have loved to frequent the wood-burning pizza restaurant down the street or twirled spaghetti at the trattoria on the square, these options were well outside my meager budget.

In time, I discovered that I could eat like royalty thanks to the local alimentari. Alimentari are the Italian versions of a deli or bodega with a decidedly gourmet bent. They vary in what they stock, but the one I frequented sold a little of everything—cat food, toilet paper, sliced-to-order salami and prosciutto, fresh pasta, cheeses, and most important to this starving student: salads. There, I discovered a tuna-based salad so incredible that I still make it weekly for lunch.

This Italian tuna salad was the antithesis of my mom’s monochrome white tuna and mayonnaise “salad.” It was a brightly colored, vibrant-tasting, chunky tumble of moist tuna, roasted red bell peppers, tangy kalamata olives, minced red onion, parsley, and toasted pine nuts in a lemony vinaigrette. It was so awesome I bought a small container of it almost every day for a year and even got to know the sweet mom-and-pop proprietors, who gave me a metal fork to keep and use to eat my daily salad, knowing I was kitchenless.