Now and then I pass through the Kunsthistorisches Museum, just as he would have. It was there that I had a major realization about the theme of breastfeeding in the Oedipus Complex and how it relates to the origins of tiramisu. He would have visited the then newly-opened Kunsthistorisches Museum and returned there regularly to admire the Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek and Roman collections. My guess is that he would have been struck, at least unconsciously, by a particular painting by Orazio Gentileschi, father of the great Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi.
It presents the Oedipus complex as it plays out in a huis-clos depiction of a family nucleus, including both breastfeeding and the symbolic murder of a father.
Looking at it a posteriori , with contemporary eyes, I had many realizations. In the painting, the infant is feeding on breast milk.
We know Sigmund Freud loved English custard and Vanilla ice cream. With its base of milk, eggs and vanilla, tiramisu would have found a devout eater in Sigmund Freud, and not only because of his love for Italy. But contemporary tiramisu did not yet exist.
Others had written previously about the dessert, claiming that tiramisu was invented in sixteenth-century Tuscany during the visit of the Duke of Tuscany and later spread to Veneto, Treviso and Venice; it turns out this is not true. But the written proof the Padovanis produced officially shifted the trail of tiramisu from Treviso and Venice to the neighboring province to its east, Friuli-Venezia Giulia literally Friuli-East Venice , around Trieste, Gorizia and up north towards Tolmezzo near the Austrian border.
